(Credits: Far Out / Dennis Carney A / Sugar Hill Records / Library Of Congress)
Sun 18 January 2026 19:45, UK
The world of country music isn’t always the most forgiving, and Dolly Parton never took a second of her time in the spotlight for granted.
She was blessed with one of the greatest voices that the world had ever known, and she wanted to make sure that she spent all her days trying to be the best person that she could be both on and off the stage. And while it’s physically impossible not to find some sense of charm in what Parton does, there are many singers who left her absolutely speechless when she first got started.
But the country music world was a lot different from the minute that Parton began singing her songs. A lot of what she had sung with the likes of Porter Wagoner were very traditional tunes that people could sing around a campfire, but when she started speaking her mind, she wasn’t about to mince her words, either. The problems that Johnny Cash faced in his songs were a lot different from what Parton lived through on a day-to-day basis, and while there are fantastic stories in her tunes, there are also tracks like ‘Coat of Many Colours’ that had a few lessons to share as well.
Not everyone was ready for those kinds of tunes, but Parton wanted to carry on the same kind of musical tradition that she heard from her greatest inspirations. George Jones may have been one of the foundations of country music with his tales of heartache, but there are also people like Kitty Wells who managed to give women a voice that they didn’t have before. Women didn’t have to only be honky tonk angels, and even people like Loretta Lynn were ready to throw down when she made songs like ‘Fist City’.
That said, Parton could never resist the kind of singer who could tell their story whenever they opened their mouth. Whether you’re listening to someone like Johnny Cash or Hank Williams, you can hear the life experience in their voice before you even know what the song was about, and while Patsy Cline was a lot more gentle performer than most, the way that her voice shook on all of her songs was a thing of beauty.
Her versions of songs like Willie Nelson’s ‘Crazy’ and ‘I Fall to Pieces’ are some of the greatest country vocal performances of all time, but that didn’t come without some hardship. Cline had more than her fair share of accidents, and long before she passed away in a plane crash, one of her previous tragic accidents never seemed to put a dent in her vocal chops as far as Parton could tell.
She was still that same storyteller, and that voice seemed to come straight from the heavens whenever Parton heard it, saying, “I just felt sorry and sad just thinking about her nearly getting killed in a wreck and how she wound up dying anyway. I just remember looking at her and seeing that and then her walking to the microphone and her starting to sing and then nothing else registered besides her God-given voice.”
Then again, isn’t that what all great singers should strive for? Anyone can write songs that are meant to show off the voice every now and again, but even if Parton didn’t have the same instrument that Whitney Houston had when she sang ‘I Will Always Love You’, you could feel the world stop for a second when her version started, almost if she was singing directly to you half the time.
It took a lot of practice for anyone to get to that level of expertise, but Parton said that it wasn’t simply about running scales and writing a bunch of great songs that got people like Cline to the top of the charts. All good music needs to have heart behind it, and if someone has that much conviction in the words they’re singing, it’s not hard to believe that there was some divine intervention at play that rubbed off on the record.
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