Additionally, 1973 yielded what has come to be regarded by some as her most nearly perfect album, My Tennessee Mountain Home, a bittersweet look back at a life and a tradition she was determined to leave behind. She was voted the Country Music Association’s Female Vocalist of the Year in both 19. In retrospect, the early- to mid-1970s was the most creatively fertile period of Parton’s country music career. Under contractual obligations, he continued to produce her records (including the #1 hit “The Bargain Store” in 1975) until 1976, but she was soon on her own. Parton’s first solo #1 hit was her composition “Joshua” (1971), which led to three more #1 songs in 1974: “Jolene,” “Love Is Like a Butterfly,” and “I Will Always Love You.” That the latter song was her own personal farewell to partner Wagoner became painfully evident to him when she left his TV show that year. RCA Records signed Parton as both Wagoner’s duet partner and a solo recording artist, and she became increasingly successful in both personas, soon beginning to eclipse Wagoner’s own star. Her hourglass figure, outrageous outfits, and angelic voice played perfectly against Wagoner’s cornpone humor and old-fashioned country sensibility. As a team, Wagoner and Parton became immediate audience favorites. Parton’s pivotal career moment came in 1967, in the form of a phone call from the syndicated television series The Porter Wagoner Show, whose flashy-dressing, traditional country–singing host was looking to replace his duet partner, Norma Jean. Then she recorded for Fred Foster’s Monument Records from 1965 to 1967, and “Dumb Blonde”-which attacked traditional female stereotypes-became her first Top Forty hit. Parton’s music career progressed apace people began to take note of her as a songwriter, especially after a pair of songs she wrote with Owens became Top Ten hits for Bill Phillips in 1966. Her first day in town, she met her future husband, contractor Carl Dean, in a laundromat. Parton was not daunted by the lack of success of her early recordings, so in 1964 she packed her bags and left for Nashville immediately after graduating from high school. She also recorded a single for a small Louisiana label, and one for Mercury Records in Nashville in 1962. Nashville soon took note of Parton, and she made her first guest appearance on the Grand Ole Opry at age thirteen in 1959. Parton was encouraged in her tentative attempts at music by her uncle Bill Owens, who bought her a guitar and, by the time Parton was ten years old, landed her a stint on a television variety show in the nearest big town, Knoxville. For example, 1971’s “Coat of Many Colors” (#4 country hit) was a straight-ahead account of a humiliating experience Parton suffered at school when classmates made fun of her homemade patchwork coat. Parton’s childhood figured strongly in her ambition to escape her circumstances and in the many frank, unromantic songs she wrote about her experience and life in Appalachia. Several of Dolly’s eleven siblings have been active in music, and some worked for a time in her family band. Dolly’s grandfather was a fiddling preacher who wrote “Singing His Praise,” which was recorded by Kitty Wells. Her mother was a singer who taught Dolly both church music and the Elizabethan ballads her ancestors brought to America. She came from deep in Appalachia, where music was an integral part of life for those who, like the Partons, struggled to make a hard living. Beginning in 1999, she returned to the music of her youth and began rebuilding a tradition-minded fan base with a series of critically acclaimed bluegrass albums.ĭolly Rebecca Parton was born into a large family, the fourth of twelve children, on January 19, 1946, in Locust Ridge, Tennessee. But her career-and her appeal to fans of hard country-was far from over. Then Parton took her crusade a step further by crossing over to the pop world-landing on the cover of Rolling Stone, achieving pop hits, and starring in a series of Hollywood movies.Īlong the way, Parton lost much of her core country audience, to the point that she dissolved her fan club, which had been one of the staunchest in country music, in 1997. With their strong feminine stances in the 1960s and 1970s, Dolly Parton and fellow pioneers Loretta Lynn and Tammy Wynette revolutionized the world of country music for women performers.
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