Dolly

I have been so impressed that the woman who wrote 3000 songs, recorded 300 of them, and saucily embraced the cartoonish character snobby elites tried to impale her on has had the collective obituary of people writing about her character. Don't we all just wish.

This song was first recorded 100 years ago, and as it is Roud 410, the guess is that it is at least 50 years older than that. Probably not deeply old, or it would have surfaced somewhere in Appalachia. Dolly was from Pigeon Forge, Sevier County, TN, and if you were to pick an archetypal Appalachian place to set a novel you could hardly do better. It's 2-3 hours* from KY, WV, VA, NC,  SC, GA, and AL, an obscure settlement in an obscure county, on an obscure river that is not along one valley, but four. It's not so obscure anymore, because of all the Dolly Parton things that are there now.

This was fifty years ago. I always thought she was over-the-top and annoying - until she sang, at which point I would just stop whatever I was doing and listen for a bit. "But whoever clings to her life will lose it, and she who gives her life away will save it." (Luke 17:33) She gave herself away.

*When she was born it was more like 4-5 hours, except worse in snow or mud season, but still...