“And try to make the most of every moment / ’Cause if you never try, you never win.” There are few more appropriate lines with which to begin an obituary of Dolly Parton, although they do have the slight disadvantage of sounding like something that might be printed on an especially tawdry greetings card. Dolly – always Dolly, never ‘Ms Parton’ – was never been particularly concerned about that sort of thing. She understood that sincerity was generally more effective than sophistication, and that if something was true there was little point in making it sound cleverer than it was. She was the greatest singer of her generation, the female Elvis if you will, and she was damned if anyone was ever going to persuade her otherwise.
The narrative that was the easiest to send to the press was that she came from extreme poverty in Tennessee and became one of the richest and most famous women in America. It is true, but it does not quite explain the international fascination with the character she presented. Dolly had the enormous hair, the epic (and, by her account, perfectly God-given) breasts, the Liberace-level clothes, the vast eyelashes and the self-deprecating jokes about all of them. She looked like a caricature of a glamorous country singer, and yet she was the person who had invented the caricature in the first place.
