A country megastar’s formula for success
A star then, a legend today: Dolly Parton in 1977
Quelle: Getty Images
What does it take to become Dolly Parton? “Three chords and one truth,” she reveals in her first novel. But you also need a tough business acumen. A look at her incredible success story that continues to this day.
“Big dreams and faded jeans”, as she says on her new single, is what Dolly Parton also had when she once set out from the rednecks in the Smokey Mountains, Tennessee, to make country music more feminine. She usually did this in frilly dresses and with messed up blonde hair, but the days when Dolly Barbie, self-confident and glamorously pimped up, were dismissed as “Dumb Blonde” (so her self-ironic first single) and others sang after the mouth, are long gone Story.
The now 76-year-old country legend made her debut at the age of 13 with her self-written song “Puppy Love” in the Grand Ole Opry of Nashville, the Bayreuth festival hall of her musical genre. Since then, she has consistently featured in the top 100 as a singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, actress and entrepreneur. She has sold more than 100 million albums and won ten Grammys, composed musicals and acted in films. One of her first mega successes, “Coat Of Many Colors” summed up the motto of her life.
Dolly Parton als Philanthropin
Married to the same man to this day, the bubbly Dolly Parton emancipated herself earlier and stood up for women’s rights more emphatically than some thin-lipped leftists. In addition to silicone and botox, she relied on true values: solidarity, empathy, thirst for education, enlightenment. She has given millions of dollars for the corona vaccine development. With her Imagination Library foundation, she sends over a million books free of charge to children in five countries every month.
Of course, Parton is also a tough businesswoman. You can see it as an innovative merchandising project, which she has now presented as a multimedia double whammy. Collaborations have always been one of their specialties, just think of the washboard siren discs with Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris. Now she has teamed up with accomplished thriller writer James Patterson for her first novel Run, Rose, Run (in German from Blanvalet Verlag, 18 euros).
The 75-year-old, who is best known for his Alex Cross volumes, has sold over 100 million books in 40 languages, “more than Dan Brown, John Grisham and Stephen King combined,” as Der Spiegel calculated. He wrote a political thriller with Bill Clinton in 2018, and a sequel has been announced.
Parton and Patterson’s mystery novel, subtitled One Night in Nashville, topped the New York Times bestseller list with ease. At the same time, Parton – the voice is sandpaper rough but intact – is in the country charts with the album of the same name “Run, Rose, Run”. The first single release was “Big Dreams And Faded Jeans”.
The other song titles could also be chapter titles of her novel: “Demons”, “Snakes In The Grass”, “Woman Up (And Take It Like A Man)”, “Lost And Found”, “Love And Lust”, “Dark Night, bright future”. From “9 to 5” she certainly didn’t fiddle with the keys and screw the letters: “In the Louis XVI bedroom mirror in Suite 409 in the Hotel Aquitaine a slim, beautiful woman scurried by for a split second with wide blue eyes, clenched fists and blowing dark hair.” stands. The novel is a country music portrait of manners, smooth and enjoyable to read.
It begins with a young country singer named AnnyLee Keyes jumping off the hotel balcony, who appears to have committed suicide. This was followed by the “Eleven Months Ago” flashback to a still penniless girl with big dreams and even bigger tunes in her head. Similarities to a living person are not accidental. And the recently retired country queen Ruthanna Ryder also seems somehow familiar. So the novel tells about how the young Dolly Parton meets the older one.
“Three chords and one truth” is what it takes to make a career with a good country song. AnnyLee Keyes has her, and Ryder is helping her find her way through Nashville’s dangerous blue-grass jungle. And until the happy ending, it’s paved with lots of songs that happen to be on the 48th Dolly Parton album. This self-reflection is called cross-promotion. It reads 551 pages sympathetically shallow, sounds cute on CD. Welcome to Dollywood!