Dolly Parton may be the only one who can help us. Who else can bridge the divide? America needs this woman, this force of nature, now more than ever: a mighty proto-feminist in a pneumatic brassiere, a Bey-level business mogul who made her first millions playing the clueless blonde in Country duets; a woman with a large gay following to go along with the vast swath of the rural South that was raised on her tunes like mother's milk. She is the uniter that America might deserve if it tried a little harder. Think about it: Red State roots and Blue State influence, GOP drawl and Dem credentials, Trump money and Hillary chromosomes… If only someone had thought about this a few months ago, we could have spared ourselves a whole lot of bullshit.
But it's too late for that now; it's wound-licking time. Dolly can help with that, too. Her new tour is billed as a stripped-down affair, which seems fitting. She arrives at Amalie Arena on November 26, in support of her latest studio album, Pure & Simple—her 43rd.
DO THIS: DOLLY PARTON AT AMALIE ARENA 11.26.16
Some may rightly wonder why you would want a stripped-down Dolly Parton experience—isn't her essence contained in the glitz, the rhinestone overload, the blonde tease-up that threatens to swallow the whole world, the cleavage that already has—isn't this what Dolly is all about?
Well, yes and no.
Behind the platinum sheen there has always been a sizeable black core of pain and privation. It stretches all the way back to her origins, one of twelve children of an illiterate farmer in Sevier County, Tennessee (think Cormac McCarthy's Appalachian novels). Like every good country boy or girl she fled as soon as she was able, moving to Nashville the day after she graduated from high school. And like every good country boy or girl, she came back. The fruits of that prodigal return is, of course, Dollywood, which squats atop Pigeon Forge where its sequined brilliance is surely visible from space. (It also contains, fun fact, the largest water park in Tennessee. Road trip!)
But all along her music retained that raw edge of the hungry, pretty girl out of the Great Smoky Mountains whose parents paid the birthing-doctor with a bag of oatmeal. The early albums have a real grit and verve; men often end up poisoned, the women often end up pregnant. There is a pinch of suicide and a dash of incest. It isn't all this dark, but when you've written something like 3,000 songs (she's one of Nashville's most prolific songwriters) you're bound to touch on some pretty heavy topics. The common denominator is an earthy realness. In this way, Parton is closer to Country's new wave of writerly tough girls like Kacey Musgraves than, say, Faith Hill. Nothing against Faith Hill.
There's a sense in which Dolly Parton has been played false by her own globe-conquering image. Yeah, it's worked for her, and one oughtn't discount the few kazillion bucks it's made along the way. But it may have blinded us all, a little, to her true merits and daring. Even the image itself is more complex than it seems; you can hear it in a clip from an 80s talk show: "When I first started lookin' the way I did, outrageous lookin', I was a young girl back in Sevierville, Tennessee. And I patterned my look, sincerely, after what they called the 'trash' in our hometown. There was a lady that was the 'town tramp,' they called her. But I didn't know what that word meant! I just thought she was beautiful. She had these tight clothes, short dresses, great legs and high heels…And I thought, 'When I grow up, that's how I'm gonna look.'" And so she did. And she claimed it, too, her image and her physique. We can fairly call her body-positive, sex-positive, before her time. We may have turned it into a easy trope and she may have used it as a semi-ironic calling card, but we shouldn't discount her basic daring. It's never too safe to look like the town tramp. The fact that she did so anyway, and continues to do so, is impressive.
So maybe Parton's new tour format makes perfect sense. There is, indeed, substance under the sheen, and plenty of it. The Pure & Simple Tour promises to foreground all that. It's a smaller operation, pared down to fit into more intimate venues (like, uh, the Amalie Arena?). The stage holds just a three piece band, plus Dolly reportedly shredding multiple instruments. Parton may feel omnipresent, but this tour is a relative rarity: she's no road-dog Willie Nelson or Bob Dylan (thank goodness; can someone tell the man to stop already?). No, she usually just sits pretty in Pigeon Forge, plotting her next act. The show whirring into Tampa represents a pretty good move, yet another canny decision at the perfect moment. A course-correction: strip away the campiness, highlight the songcraft, force us to focus on the storytelling.
Will it work? We'll see next weekend. I wouldn't bet against her.
This article appears in Nov 17-24, 2016.