This week, we'll be running a series of essays from the next issue of our print quarterly, The Pitchfork Review, in which writers discuss political music that opened their eyes. Read them all here.
When Dolly Parton was a child, her mother looked at a box of tattered old rags and saw a Technicolor dream coat. So goes the 1971 classic “Coat of Many Colors,” on which Dolly sings about how her mom once transformed left-behind scraps of fabric into a one-of-a-kind garment, telling her young daughter the biblical story of Joseph as she worked. Dolly grew up without electricity and running water, sharing beds with her 11 brothers and sisters in a small house in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee, but she remembers feeling rich anyway because she had a house full of love.
As the song’s lyrics go, she was proud to put the coat on once it was finished, and though the other kids at school made fun of her for having threadbare clothing, it didn’t bother her a bit. “My coat of many colors was worth more than all their clothes,” Dolly sings. “One is only poor only if they choose to be.”
“Coat of Many Colors” is a lovely fable, a rosy way to mythologize a childhood that was likely filled with its share of challenges. Dolly has long said that it is her most personal song—no small thing considering that the 70-year-old has penned more than 3,000. “To me, it’s more than a song,” she told an interviewer last year. “It’s an attitude. It’s a philosophy.” And, in 2016, I’ve come to see it as something even bigger: a comforting, critical ethos worth heeding in a troubling age. In this year of shootings and endless struggles, with an election cycle that has elevated all our anxieties instead of soothing them, the sage wisdom of a song like “Coat of Many Colors” reminds us of something essential about the American can-do spirit. And, in a broader sense, at a moment when the idea of basic national identity feels like it is ripping apart at the seams—when class and geography and race are built up to be insurmountable barriers—Dolly offers us a little respite from this insanity and, perhaps, a way forward.
Dolly is a rural white person from the center of the South who has found just as much of a home in the hearts of fans in big cities on the coasts. She never lost the rugged charm that makes her a country girl, all while finding ways to build roads between communities that, from some vantage points, seem further apart than ever. “Been a lot of Bible Belt folks that don’t accept a lot of things and a lot of people. But I just always had a very open mind and a very open heart,” she told the A.V. Club in 2011 when asked about her relationship with her adoring LGBT fans. “I appreciate getting accepted myself, because I know I’m unusual. And I love the unusual in other people.” She’s a God-fearing Christian who openly and proudly loves her gay fans, a Nashville icon imitated by drag queens, a honky-tonk performer sampled by rappers. Dolly Parton, simply, might be the last thing that all Americans have in common.
Think of the way she mythologizes coming up with her signature look—big boobs, red lips, tight skirts—which she has long claimed is modeled on a “tramp” she saw in town as a child. As she tells it, her mother disparaged the woman by calling her “trash,” and Dolly cheekily replied with a smile: “Well, mama, I want to look like trash!” “We were really redneck, roughneck, hillbilly people. And I’m proud of it,” she told Southern Living Magazine in 2014. “That keeps you humble; that keeps you good.” She has been honored by the Kennedy Center and performed for U.S. Presidents, but even then, she makes a joke out of her rags-to-riches trajectory: “There’s nothing like white trash at the White House!” goes a quote long attributed to her.
Populism has been a buzzword in this election season, but compare Dolly’s pleasant brand of it to the way Donald Trump has campaigned for president by playing on the very real economic worries of rural and small-town poor. As Trump leaves his skyscraper in Manhattan to travel the country in his private jet, meeting voters in Iowa and New Hampshire and Ohio, I’m struck by how his outsider’s view of the so-called “real America” has led him to come up with answers that are the polar opposite of what I hear on “Coat of Many Colors.” He blames Muslims and immigrants instead of trying to come up with practical solutions. He stokes xenophobic fears and paranoia instead of trying to find something—anything—hopeful. Of course, it will take more than songs and platitudes to fix painful realities, but it’s hard to comprehend how Dolly, who really was rural and impoverished, sees so much possibility in the ideas behind “Coat of Many Colors,” where Trump, a city boy with a big leg up, only sees anger and hate.
The greatest testament to the Dolly school of politics was on display at a recent concert in Forest Hills, Queens, not so far from where Trump was born and raised. She played eight instruments throughout the night (all of them adorned with rhinestones), sang songs that hit notes of God and country in between playful pop hits like “9 to 5,” and told many stories about her life growing up in Tennessee. In a medley of cover songs that would play well on both sides of the Mason-Dixon, she performed “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” a song by the Band told empathetically from the vantage point of a defeated Confederate soldier, and Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” which became a Civil Rights anthem in the 1960s. And she sang “Coat of Many Colors,” with a touch of sincerity so potent it was hard not to see it as an alternate national anthem, a powerful dash of foundational American folklore.
As the concert went on, I began to see Dolly as a hopeful bridge between conservative and liberal, Northern and Southern, rural and urban. Throughout her career, she’s been careful never to endorse a candidate for president, aware, I would guess, that her audience is a sensitive, tenuous mix. In fact, I had the opportunity to speak with her a few weeks after the concert about a new studio album, her 43rd, and she more or less said that she thought neither Hillary Clinton nor Trump seemed to care enough about the “good old American people.” I couldn’t disagree. During the show, she defused the political tensions of the summer by joking that maybe what the White House needed more than anything was “more boobs!” before pointing to her own. Though part of me went into the night hoping she’d disavow Trump, revealing with her authentic country bonafides what a horrible phony he is, she didn’t. But I eventually realized that her evasion of party politics could be a wonderful thing: Though we have come to see our political identities in concrete terms, with only one of two options available, Dolly is neither, at least to the public. It’s comforting that she’s just Dolly, and Dolly is for everyone.
So “Coat of Many Colors” is just about the prettiest little song you ever could hear and a balm in trying times. But what can we really learn from it? Perhaps the notion that “one is only poor only if they choose to be” is naive to the realities of hardship and poverty. But greeting even the worst things in the world with an ear for how we could be better—more modest, less judgmental, more loving—is a decent jumping-off point, especially when nothing else seems to be getting us any closer to the people we want to be. Dolly is the best of us, proof that there’s still something good and worthwhile in these fractured 50 states. It might not be enough to stitch us all back together into some kind of Technicolor dream country, but right now, all we’ve got is a box of rags, and someone’s got to start sewing.