“What people’s lives were like”: Dolly Parton’s morbid secret about writing songs
Dolly Parton, the glowing, inspiring, ever-positive face of country music, is hiding a very dark secret.
Now, before anyone starts properly panicking or lighting their pitchforks, don’t worry: she’s not about to be cancelled, but it does remain true that there is a slightly more morose side to the woman seemingly placed on Earth purely to spread joy. After all, every artist has their escape – it’s just that with hers, she almost connects to the other side.
To be clear, Parton has never claimed that her songwriting is the most advanced or insightful you’ll ever find floating around in the musical canon. It was for this exact reason that she praised artists like Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard as inspirations, because despite the simplicity of their words, they instantly cut through the heart of their true power.
In this regard, it makes sense why she would want to follow suit… Her songs have always been for the many, not the few, but to do that, you need to tap into something universal, and no matter who you are, where you come from, or what life has thrown at you, what’s the one thing that’s inevitably coming for us all? Death.
This is not an attempt to paint Parton as the new incarnation of the Grim Reaper, but then again, she does write all her songs in cemeteries. While they are the stereotypical site of many a horror film’s bloody endings, graveyards actually come to represent something quite different once you take the fear aspect out of them.
In the singer’s eyes, they are a sanctuary of peace and quiet, a place where she can be at one with her thoughts and clear her mind of the rest of the world – it might not be the environment you would imagine that gets the creative juices flowing, but for Parton, they are the essential muse for lives lived, loved, and lost.
“I just love walking through them and looking at [the headstones],” she once revealed in an interview. “I just love to imagine what people’s lives were like. They’re so well kept, and they’re peaceful.” Indeed, imagining those exact stories has been the catalyst for quite a number of her songs, from ‘Jeannie’s Afraid of the Dark’ to ‘Out of the Silence (Came a Song)’.
Parton doesn’t have an affinity for any particular cemetery, although she has previously spoken of her connection with Angel Hill in the Great Smoky Mountains, where she was born, and where many of her family members, including her baby brother, whom the hill is named after, are buried.
Yet if you’re ever looking for a quiet moment of reflection and you suddenly see a distinctive-looking woman furiously scribbling down notes and humming melodies, you might just have stumbled across a country legend in the thick of her songwriting muse – thankfully, she’s good at it, because otherwise it could come back to haunt her.
