When Dolly Parton died last week, it felt as if the world had sunk behind the horizon. I was sitting in my office at home when the news broke on a Tuesday. My mother was one of the first people to text me. “Work must be so busy,” she messaged. “She was so young.”
This was true. At 80, Parton was as determined as ever to change the world. My mother and I admire that about her and when we talked on the phone, we reminisced about Parton’s life. I asked her what about the music legend resonated most with her. “Her openness, no-nonsense approach to life,” my mom replied, “and her humor.”
Parton was born in a one-bedroom cabin tucked away in the Great Smoky Mountains and was the fourth of 12 children. It was a childhood that was not unlike that of my mother, who had also grown up in a modest home, except hers was filled with a dozen sisters and brothers on the shores of the Philippines’ Bataan Peninsula. When Parton landed in Nashville and my mother arrived in America, both went to great lengths to demand a seat at the table in their respective fields. Parton famously became the most successful female country artist of all time; my mother became a doctor and opened a successful practice in California’s Central Valley.
I see Dolly in the women who raised me. My mother, Cynthia, taught me to go through life with both relentless ambition and kindness. I try my best to practice it, and when I find it hard to do either — which is often — I reach for the stories of people like my mother and Dolly. This year, as Parton’s health became a subject in the news alongside her countless philanthropic and business endeavors, I found myself revisiting her story time and again. I saw so much of my mother and grandmothers in Parton.
Dolly had a fearless way of embracing who she was and demanding her worth. After Parton hopped on a Greyhound bus headed for Nashville in 1964 at 18 with just “dreams, my old guitar, [and] the songs I had written,” she wrote in her 1994 autobiography, she was uncompromising in her pursuit of the American dream. With her towering bleached-blond hair, long acrylic nails, and red lips, she navigated the world on her own terms over the next six decades.
When she took a risk and split from the popular Porter Wagoner Show to pursue a solo career, she wrote a song to end her professional association with the veteran hitmaker and show host, “I Will Always Love You,” which topped the country charts in 1974. But when Elvis Presley wanted to record it and his manager, Colonel Tom Parker, said the deal could only be done if Parton handed over half her publishing rights, she refused. “I Will Always Love You” would later make Parton millions after Whitney Houston recorded it for the 1992 film The Bodyguard.
I’ve seen my mother hold onto a similar determination as a woman and immigrant in the U.S. She packed up her tiny clinic in her hometown village in the Eighties and eventually found herself in Chicago, studying for her medical exams before her residency at Cook County Hospital. During this time, she sold makeup and lugged encyclopedias to pay help pay the bills while she was still pregnant with me.
When the family moved to California and she and my stepdad saved up enough to rent a clinic, the landlord denied them after taking one look at their beat-up Toyota. Like Dolly, she made her own way, and in two weeks, they bought the clinic across the street.
In high school, I’d listen to “9 to 5” on repeat when running through my neighborhood’s suburban streets. Some days, I’d lay in my bed singing the lyrics with the gusto of someone that had never worked a day in her life. Then, I graduated college, got my first job, and both witnessed and experienced how women, especially women of color, were treated in the workforce. Our ideas were dismissed in meetings, or worse, repeated to us like they were never our own; there were times men considered us trivial and given no more consideration than a floor lamp; advances were made that we neither desired nor asked for; and we always had to try monumentally harder than our male counterparts. Dolly’s “9 to 5” anthem was never more true.
Like my mother and Dolly, however, it didn’t determine who I was.
Empathy was a resounding characteristic of Parton’s songwriting from the tragic “Down From Dover,” a tale of an abandoned woman who delivers a stillborn child, to the searing “Just Because I’m a Woman” lambasting sexist double standards.
It extended to 9 to 5 and Odd Jobs, Dolly’s tribute to working-class America. While Parton was decidedly neutral when it came to publicly speaking on political events of the time, her music did the talking. The LP was released in 1980 and featured tracks that cast an unblinking eye toward the cruel realities of coal miners (“Dark as a Dungeon”) and alienated autoworkers (“Detroit City”). She covered Woody Guthrie’s devastating “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)” too.
Written in 1948, Guthrie’s song was inspired by a plane crash in Fresno, California, that killed 32 people, including 28 Mexican farmworkers. Some had worked in the country legally and others had been undocumented. All of them had been left out of media reports, simply relegated to the status of “deportees,” while the four white victims on board were named.
Guthrie’s scathing protest symbolized the names of the dead and has been covered by numerous artists from Joni Mitchell to the country supergroup the Highwaymen, yet Parton’s decision to place the rendition alongside the stories of other American laborers was a form of solidarity in itself. (The 28 farmworkers would be honored in a memorial65 years later.) Rarely are the stories of immigrants placed on the same pages of the U.S.-born working class, which politics and media have pitted against each other throughout much of this country’s history.
Parton’s recognition of Mexican immigrants acknowledges the value of those who come to America with a dream, a story that echoes the songs her mother, Avie Lee, sang to her children of European immigrants who settled in southern Appalachia.
When I play “Deportee” and “9 to 5,” I think of Dolly’s lifelong dedication to uniting this country by our shared struggles, joys, and humanity. I think of my mother, sitting on a plane to America with a suitcase and leaving behind everything she knew to start again. I think of my grandmothers, who watched their daughters struggle in a country that saw them as less and pick themselves up every time they were pushed down. I think of my sister, too, and myself, daughters of immigrants, who were raised with love and pride by women who crossed an ocean so we, like Dolly, could dream, too.
Click here to read the full article.
