Dolly Parton Wrote America’s Best Love Song

Simply put, “I Will Always Love You” is one of the best love songs ever written. Its author, Dolly Parton, died Tuesday at 80 years old, having gone around the world and settled right back into the Smoky Mountains that have given so much to the great American songbook. In death, Parton now takes her place among this book’s legendary contributors.

It was there in the Smokies that Parton found herself transfixed by the “town trollop” who inspired her world-famous look. But Parton’s physical flamboyance often stood in contrast with the simplicity of her sound. This isn’t to say she stuck to mountain music. Parton built a pop career so extreme it generated controversy in Nashville, where discomfort with genre-bending was beginning to build as disco swept the country.

An interview from the late 1970s that resurfaced last year saw Parton defending the move on business grounds. “I’ve been a writer and a singer all my life. And I was as popular as anybody could be in country music,” she said. “But I was only selling like … 200,000 albums. So although everybody was talking about how good I was, there’s just a certain amount of people who buy records in country music. And you can’t expect to make a lot of money just in country music.”

This is precisely the same strategy that catapulted Taylor Swift into the stratosphere, taking country radio to new audiences that were even less invested in purity than Parton’s early listeners. Country music is America’s great sonic blend, and always has been: the West African banjo, the Italian mandolin, the black spirituals, and, of course, the foundational Scots-Irish traditions. It was the invention of radio that allowed country to broadcast, rather than narrowcast, from coast to coast and around the globe. Television took it even further — and Dolly Parton was along for nearly the entire ride. As technology allowed the sound of Tennessee to travel the world, Parton went with it, and never shied away from finding new packaging in which to deliver her twang. But the twang stayed.

It would be wrong to say she was ahead of her time. In terms of pioneering country pop and wholeheartedly embracing sexuality, Parton changed the culture. In that sense, her arc is representative of Boomer powerhouses who left the country much different than they found it — for better or worse. But there will be ample time for that debate.

Parton was a philanthropist who did her best to live out Matthew 5. An enormous amount of her charity was local to the Smoky Mountains, where she not only did what she could to keep kids in school and help people rebuild after natural disasters, but also created hundreds of jobs and tourism. Her marriage was so quiet it long inspired speculation and rumors, but like much of Parton’s personal life, it appears to have been admirably quaint in the shadow of a public life that was anything but. She died just over a year after her husband of nearly six decades, Carl Dean. He was an asphalt paver. They traveled the country in an RV together.

“I Will Always Love You” is a painfully simple song. Though it’s most associated in pop culture with Whitney Houston, Parton wrote the ballad not about Dean but Porter Wagoner — an amusingly homely inspiration for a gorgeous tune. When artists pass, it can bring out the worst of us — people trip over their heels trying to play the hipster and find the deepest cut they can declare someone’s “best” work. Dolly had some songs that could fit this bill, but it’s so unnecessary in her case. “I Will Always Love You” isn’t just her most popular song; it’s her best. And it’s one of our best too. Life treated her kind.

Emily Jashinsky is D.C. correspondent at UnHerd. She previously covered politics as a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner. Prior to joining the Examiner, Emily was the spokeswoman for Young America’s Foundation. She’s interviewed leading politicians and entertainers and appeared regularly as a guest on major television news programs, including “Fox News Sunday,” “Media Buzz,” and “Washington Journal.” Her work has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, the Telegraph, The Hill, and more. Emily also serves as director of the National Journalism Center, co-host of the news show “Counter Points” on the Breaking Points network and a visiting fellow at Independent Women’s Forum. Originally from Wisconsin, she is a graduate of George Washington University.