Dolly Parton: a hard road from Appalachia to the Kennedy Center

By PETER COOPER Staff Writer - THE TENNESSEAN

Before Dollywood and ''9 to 5'' and ''I Will Always Love You'' and all such as that, Dolly Parton lived in a dodgy trailer on Murfreesboro Road.

Her impoverished family back in East Tennessee worried about her decision to move to a big, hard town like Nashville, and some folks back home told her she'd likely starve to death.

''I thought, 'Well, how much poorer can I be?' '' said Parton, 60, who tonight will receive the nation's highest award for artistic achievement during the 29th annual Kennedy Center Honors. ''I was poor at home in the mountains, I figured I could be poor somewhere else.''

In any case, starving to death wasn't a possibility for Dolly Parton.

''To eat, I used to go over to some of the motels, and I'd go up and down the halls and find where people had left their trays out in the hallways,'' she said. ''I'd get pieces of hamburger or whatever from their trays. I didn't feel like a bum. I felt like, 'Lord, some people waste more food than other people have.' There'd be stuff left over that people hadn't even touched.''

Parton knows that such behavior might seem at the least uncouth and at the most outright strange, and she's never been a bit scared of aberrance. She stood out as a schoolgirl who sang on Knoxville television as a pre-teen. She stood out as an early teen who wrangled a guest slot on the Grand Ole Opry with the help of Opry star Jimmy C. Newman, and she now stands as a giant of American popular music.

Her legacy, which will be celebrated at the Kennedy Center tonight with songs and praise from a gathering of surprise guests, is inherently singular. Her voice, her appearance, her songs, her career decisions and most everything else about Parton are anything and everything but typical.

Like the three other country artists who have received Kennedy Center Honors ? Loretta Lynn, Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash ? Parton may rightly be considered a maverick. She was the first country female artist to record two No. 1 pop singles, to accumulate 50 Top 10 country singles, to be nominated for an Academy Award, to be worth $500 million (estimated in the late 1990s by Business Nashville magazine) or, in an event that caused much controversy in 1978, to appear on the cover of Playboy magazine. She was also the first female songwriter to win performing rights organization BMI's Five-Million Air Award, given for 5 million radio airings of ''I Will Always Love You.''

But even those who don't know that Parton ever set pen to paper and wrote a song tend to be aware of her enduringly curious combination punch of a mountain-pure voice and outlandish, wig-wearing, bespangled image. This is a woman who yodels in stilettos. She's not planning to tone it down in Washington this weekend, as her two scheduled luncheons, a dinner with Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and tonight's gala awards show sent her on a shopping spree.

''I spent a fortune on those clothes, but I still look cheap in them,'' she said. ''But that's all right. They know how I'm gonna look, right?''

They do, but necks shall still crane. Glimpsing Dolly Parton is nearly as unusual and memorable an experience as hearing Dolly Parton. But even if she'd never mastered the grand entrance, the red carpet walk or the tough trick of finding the perfect wig, she'd have been a major force in music because of her catalog of self-penned songs, including ''I Will Always Love You,'' ''Jolene,'' ''Coat of Many Colors,'' ''My Tennessee Mountain Home'' and ''To Daddy.'' If she hadn't been a writer, she'd have made a mark with a voice that is the unmistakable starting point for hundreds of singers: The current crop of successful Parton-followers includes Alison Krauss and Lee Ann Womack.

It's the songwriting for which Parton is proudest. In a career that has garnered her entrance into the Country Music Hall of Fame, she is proudest of her inclusion in the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, and it was her songs that allowed her initial security in Music City.

''When I first realized I was going to be able to make a living out of this was when I got put on a weekly salary for my songwriting, by Fred Foster at Combine Music, in 1965,'' she said. ''I've never thought about doing anything else since then.''

That salary wasn't enough to live on, necessitating some odd jobs and some motel scavenging. The early years were full of struggle, and full of meetings with Nashville power brokers who were unaccustomed to a woman who spoke with such sweet but frank confidence.

''I think they saw somebody who was going to do it either way . . . so they might as well help me,'' said Parton, sitting in her Nashville office along 12th Avenue South. ''I was friendly, and I was country, and I was no pushover. I would go right in and say what I thought, which was, 'I'm gonna make a lot of money, do you want to get in on it?' In my mind, I was a business person: 'This is my product, I'm here to sell it. You're a business man, do you want to buy it?' I was proud to take in what I had. I thought, 'If these people are smart, maybe I'm not that good just yet but they'll see that I have potential.' I always said I had more guts than talent, but I had enough talent to back it up.''

One of the men who saw her potential, of course, was Porter Wagoner, now a Country Music Hall of Famer himself. In 1967, Wagoner hired Parton to perform on his influential syndicated radio show, and their duets were far more successful than Parton's solo efforts through the remainder of the 1960s.

By the mid-1970s, though, Parton was well-established as a solo artist, and her break from Wagoner was contentious on personal, professional and legal levels. On her own, she began her well-documented climb beyond Nashville, to pop radio and Hollywood and beyond. Along the way, she's flummoxed the country community by signing with California-based agents when that sort of thing just wasn't done and by unabashedly (and successfully) courting mainstream appeal. By the 1990s, those things were nearly de rigueur for the Nashville-based divas who followed in her wake.

''I had such strong dreams and opinions and desires of my own,'' she said. ''But, also, I leave myself open. I'm a very spiritual person. I pray every day, and I try to keep myself alert and open, and I seem to know what to do, even when other people think I've lost my mind.''

In Parton's childhood, her strict Pentecostal upbringing offered an at-times frightening spiritual vision. ''We thought God was a monster in the sky,'' she once told writer Otis James. But she is deeply attached to the notion that people ? and songs, for that matter ? are divine inspirations. She's also fearful of becoming a false idol to fans who clamor to follow her from concert to concert, who design their homes around themes from her songs and who express near-religious fervor for her. A recent documentary film called ''For the Love of Dolly'' explored the world of Parton's most devoted fans, and the film's scenes sometimes verge on frightening. Parton said she hasn't seen the movie but knows the phenomenon quite well.

''I'm flattered, but I worry about some of them a lot,'' she said. ''I want them to see the God light in me, not to worship me. I'm very touched, but I'm also very troubled sometimes about how people will live through somebody else.''

Living through others is, at heart, the opposite of everything Parton has stood for and sung for. She's into performing for others, to the point that she believes that people come to her concerts ''Not to see me be me, they come to see me be them. And I can be some of everybody.''

But her path to what the Kennedy Center has deemed a life of cultural significance has been one she forged for herself, through willful purpose.

''I wrote a song yesterday called 'The Sacrifice,' '' she said. ''The chorus says, 'I was going to be rich no matter how much it cost, and I was going to win no matter how much I lost/ 'Cause all through the years I kept my eye on the prize, but I knew early on about the sacrifice.'

''People ask if it was worth it and, yes, it was,'' she continued. ''While other people go on vacations, I work. And there were lots of lonely times. Looking back, all the bad and hurt falls away as you go on. I love thinking I'm leaving something in the world that wasn't there yesterday. When you start out in the business, you never know how you're going to be remembered when you're older.

''That song, 'The Sacrifice,' is about all that. It says, 'From grindstone to rhinestone I carry my pail, 'cause you can't drink the water if you don't dig the well.' That's kind of like how I feel.''