How Dolly Parton built a life and career on her own terms

In 2019, in the first episode of the Dolly Parton’s America podcast, Jad Abumrad asked Dolly Parton the question everyone eventually asked her: did she think of herself as a feminist? “No, I do not,” she said.

“I think of myself as a woman in business.” She spent six decades refusing a label that fit her better than almost anyone else in country music.

“I think that I just live my femininity,” she told Sky News , a deflection she gave, in one form or another, for 50 years.

Parton passed away on Aug.

25 in Nashville, Tenn., at the age of 80.

She may have been right that she never set out to be a feminist, but her career — the songs, the films, a lifetime of philanthropy — tells another story.

I’ve spent much of my career reading artists’ legacies in the songs that charted and, just as often, in the songs that didn’t.

Parton’s chart history tells the story of an artist who broke through a landscape stacked against women, and spent her final years as a featured artist on songs by women who came after her.

Breaking into a male-dominated industry Parton’s national breakthrough came in 1967, when Porter Wagoner hired her as a regular co-host and performer on his popular television show — a launching pad that put her in front of an audience she could not have reached at that point.

But the same platform set terms she’d spend years working against.

For the first six years, Parton’s solo singles climbed modestly.

“ Dumb Blonde ” peaked at 24 on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart, and “ Something Fishy ” and “ Just Because I’m a Woman ” both peaked at 17.

Meanwhile, her collaborations with Wagoner resulted in a string of Top 10 records.

As a collaborator, the ceiling was higher than as a solo artist.