ROB SCHMITZ, HOST:
In 1959, a skinny 13-year-old girl stepped off a bus in Lake Charles, Louisiana, after a 30-hour ride with her grandmother. She walked into a recording studio in a garage attached to a TV repair shop, and she began to sing.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "PUPPY LOVE")
DOLLY PARTON: (Singing) Well, Puppy love, puppy love. They all call it puppy love. I'm old enough now to kiss and hug, and I like it. It's puppy love.
SCHMITZ: It was Dolly Parton's first-ever recording. It did not make her famous, but it was a first step from her humble roots in East Tennessee to international stardom. A new biography traces that journey. It's called "Ain't Nobody's Fool: The Life And Times Of Dolly Parton." Author Martha Ackmann joins us now. Thanks for being here, Martha.
MARTHA ACKMANN: It's good to be with you, Rob.
SCHMITZ: So, Dolly Parton, of course, is an American icon. You know, writing a biography about her seems a little daunting. She's been written about so much. What did you want to illuminate about her life that hadn't been done in previous works about her?
ACKMANN: What I wanted to do - I certainly wanted to cover her songwriting, her acting career, her remarkable philanthropy. But I also wanted to locate her in history and in culture. I wanted to kind of unpack her as a unique American and someone who has had a broad impact on the country.
SCHMITZ: And what did you draw on to do that? I mean, were you able to talk to Dolly or people close to her?
ACKMANN: Yes. I was able to talk with family members, cousins, schoolmates. We reached out to Dolly and tried to secure an interview, but they did not respond. I don't think Dolly's done a full-fledged interview for a number of years now.
SCHMITZ: So let's start with Dolly's childhood. She grows up in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains, in the holler, as she calls it, one of 12 children, extremely poor. How did all of that shape her?
ACKMANN: She has always been - still is - very attuned to everything around her. It wasn't an easy road for her. Her father had a drinking problem. There were difficulties with infidelity and, certainly, poverty. I say something in the book about the family was a family of storytellers, and all those stories were like a funnel that came through Dolly, and I think that gave her the beginning of her songwriting career.
SCHMITZ: You know, and this part of her life inspired much of her best work. In the third grade, her mother sewed her a coat from scraps of recycled clothes. Dolly was so proud of it, she wore it to school for picture day.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "COAT OF MANY COLORS")
PARTON: (Singing) In my coat of many colors, I hurried off to school, just to find the others laughing and are making fun of me, in my coat of many colors my mama made for me.
SCHMITZ: That is the Dolly Parton hit, "Coat Of Many Colors," of course. It sounds like it was just completely humiliating, as you recount it. Other kids tried to tear the coat off of her, and in her third-grade photo, there's tears streaming down her face. But all of that bullying she experienced really just made her all the more determined, didn't it?
ACKMANN: Yes, it did. I found out a lot about that incident. But that song stayed kind of within Dolly for years and years and years. And in fact, she didn't even tell her mother about the incident the day after it happened. It deeply humiliated her. But then she's on a bus one day when she was with "The Porter Wagoner Show." And one of the other musicians on this show saw her grab something to write on. Dolly always seems to be without paper and pencil. So she grabs whatever was near her. And she grabbed a cleaning ticket from one of Porter Wagoner's flashy suits that he wore to perform in. And she began jotting down the lyrics to the song. Others have said songs seem to come to Dolly fully formed. And it's a good thing there are scraps of paper all around because she's fast.
SCHMITZ: And, Martha, this is where I want to bring up a song that Dolly wrote for Porter Wagoner and about Porter Wagoner. And this is a very famous song. I think it brings up how, in some ways, good of a businesswoman she was right from the beginning. I love the story of when a certain king of rock 'n' roll wants this song, and she says no. Tell us what happened.
ACKMANN: Dolly was pretty young when she wrote, "I Will Always Love You." This happened during the breakup with Porter Wagoner, where they were, again, in Nashville and fighting about her leaving. And she wrote the song, being able to pour out what she felt for Porter. She was very grateful for the chance that Porter gave her, but she knew she had to go.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "I WILL ALWAYS LOVE YOU")
PARTON: (Singing) And I will always love you. I will always love you.
ACKMANN: And then Colonel Tom Parker came knocking on her door. And again, Dolly's pretty young at this point. I think she's in her 20s. And he said Elvis would like to record this song. She was ecstatic. And she said that would be wonderful. And he said, just one thing. We have to have the publishing on it. And Dolly said, oh, I can't do that. I can't do that if it were half the publishing. She said, that's my best copyright. It was a remarkable chess move for anyone to make with Colonel Tom Parker and Elvis. Fast-forward, you know, some 20 years later...
SCHMITZ: (Laughter).
ACKMANN: ...Whitney Houston comes out her with her version of "I Will Always Love You" and just blows the roof off of it. Dolly said she was driving home in her car, and then Whitney hits the big, you know, crescendo. Dolly said she was so blown away by it that she had to pull over into a Walgreens to collect herself.
SCHMITZ: That rendition of that song is incredibly powerful, as everyone knows. Now, Dolly Parton has always had such an over-the-top style, and you write about her huge hair, her tight clothes. And there's a really interesting quote from her that you include. She said that the thing that's always worked for me is the fact that I look so totally artificial but am so totally real. What does she mean by that?
ACKMANN: Dolly sometimes calls herself a cartoon of a woman and describes her big hair and heavy makeup and sinched waist as her getup. Dolly said, looking one way and being another gives her something to play off, that people expect her to be a kind of buffoon, to be a fool in the way she looks, until they hear her sing, until they hear her songs. So it has always worked for her, and she's toned it down over the years. But she found that it also worked for her professionally because she would go up against the expectations people had for her.
SCHMITZ: And I think what's so interesting about Dolly Parton is that she has fans from throughout the political and cultural spectrum. She has fans from the religious right. She's got a huge fan base in the LGBTQ community. How is she able to appeal to so many different people?
ACKMANN: Dolly was raised in her grandfather's church. She knew the Bible. And one of her favorite verses was judge not, lest you be judged. And she lives by that. If I had to choose one word to describe Dolly Parton as a human being - I'm not talking about her as a singer or a songwriter - I would use the word decency, that hardcore decency that respects other people and treats others with compassion and openness.
SCHMITZ: That's Martha Ackmann. Her new book is called "Ain't Nobody's Fool: The Life And Times Of Dolly Parton." It's out December 30. Martha, thanks.
ACKMANN: Thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "9 TO 5")
PARTON: (Singing) I tumble out of bed and I stumble to the kitchen, pour myself a cup of ambition and yawn and stretch and try to come alive. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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