But some caution against viewing her as an activist. People in Dolly’s home community of Sevier County, Tennessee, are proud of Dolly as a cultural icon and an ambassador of southern Appalachian mountain culture. “We’re just mistreating Mother Nature,” she told National Geographic last year.“That’s like being ugly to your mama.” The natural world is its own character in her music, like lovely scenery entwined with nostalgia in songs like “My Tennessee Mountain Home.” In interviews, Dolly has certainly expressed support for environmental causes, in her down-home oratory style. “Oh, can we rise above? Can’t we show some love?” she asks in “World on Fire.” Her message is often softly wrapped in statements about love and kindness. Parton insisted the original name was chosen out of “innocent ignorance.” (This move did divide some fans.)Įven when she does speak out, Dolly never points fingers. Her speaking up came two years after she changed the name of her long-running dinner show from Dixie Stampede to Dolly’s Stampede after much criticism of its Confederate nostalgia. She publicly attested her support for Black Lives Matter with a spate of other country musicians as artists reckoned with the genre’s long silence on racial justice. Yet when Tennessee banned public drag performances, she kept quiet. She’s acknowledged, for instance, the role of the LGBT community in inspiring her stage persona. She’s given her more socially liberal audience a reason to root for her over the past few decades, though carefully and in her way, never along partisan lines, and rarely in a way that would cause her more conservative audience too much ire. The host, marveling at the breadth of the audience, called her “The great unifier.” In her home state of Tennessee, people disagree on a lot of things, but if you say a bad word about Dolly, you might find yourself with a sudden appointment in the parking lot. Four years ago, the WNYC podcast Dolly Parton’s America helped propel the iconic singer, who has enjoyed several waves of popularity over the past 50 years, beyond her traditional fan base and into coastal liberal consciousness. She is among the last universally beloved figures in pop culture, a vestige of an old version of country music where performers were allowed to be a little campier, and when they sang about killing men just to watch them die or begging a prettier woman not to steal their man. This is a little forward for Dolly, but, classically, it still avoids naming names or taking sides. They wouldn’t know the truth if it bit ’em in the ass. Now how are we to live in a world like this There’s something in this song for anyone who feels the government isn’t doing its job, conservative or progressive or in-between – the only difference is who, precisely, they consider the liar: The lyrics, which, as usual, she wrote herself, evoke a certain sense of climate anxiety, a suffocating sense of watching the world’s reliable patterns break down into a muddy mess, of watching politicians divide us even as existential threats bear down. But that’s how many of Dolly’s more “political” statements and artistic work come across - they tap into the zeitgeist without making any explicit political statements. It’s difficult to say whether Dolly explicitly intended “World on Fire” as a climate song, though people are hearing it as such. The song rocks a little harder than her usual feathery country oeuvre, and over a driving beat, she lets you know she’s about to get political.īut that don’t mean I don’t stay in touchĭolly spends the next four minutes outlining the sorry state of the world, or at least the nation, punctuating it with a rousing chorus: Blond hair piled and coiffed, her black dress glittering, she looks down into a pit of flames burning the earth. In the video for her new song, “World On Fire,” Dolly Parton sits atop a burning world.
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