Five tragic Dolly Parton songs which will still break hearts in 100 years
Today is the 80th birthday of the country icon Dolly Parton, a woman who, throughout her thrilling life, has written some of the greatest songs to ever grace a passerby’s ears.
Throughout so many decades of music, Parton has written songs which touch upon every emotion the human psyche is capable of conjuring – happy, sad, and all things that reside in the middle of those two extremes, and at the heart of all of her work is a great voice and an unwavering commitment to human emotion, which is why her happy songs bring joy wherever they’re heard, while her more sad numbers pull on heartstrings far and wide.
Today, we will be focusing on the latter. Since she has been making music, Parton has drawn from her own experiences and the lives of those around her to hold up a mirror to the world using music, with her words cutting into the ugliest of crevices, revealing the hardships that come with being human, unforgiving in their nature and yet honest in every syllable. Part of what makes these songs so sad is the truth that sits within a lot of them, but there is no artist better equipped to handle the delicate nature of sadness than Parton.
Here, we will celebrate her excellent musicianship while wiping away tears, as we consider some of her most timeless, heartbreaking offerings. These are five of Dolly Parton’s most tragic tracks that people will still be listening to in 100 years.
The five saddest Dolly Parton songs of all time:
‘Light of a Clear Blue Morning’
You’ll see as we make our way down this list that some of Dolly Parton’s saddest songs have incredibly upsetting narratives attached, but this track is slightly different, as we identify it as sad because of the overarching feeling of being trapped, which rings throughout, rather than the actual narrative itself, a reflection of Parton’s creative relationship with Porter Wagoner and her constant struggle for musical freedom. She eventually found it, and this is one of the first pieces of music to come from such freedom.
That feeling of being trapped can be upsetting to listen to, but this song equally offers glimmers of hope. It can be false hope or actually realised, regardless, it’s something the listener can no doubt identify with.
“‘Light Of A Clear Blue Morning’ was my song of deliverance,” explained Parton. “I felt like I was trapped in a situation and needed to be free, because God was calling me, life was calling me, to something bigger. But I felt like my feet were nailed to the floor.”
‘Down from Dover’
‘Down from Dover’ is one of Parton’s saddest tunes. The way she writes the song, she tells the story of a troubled, unwed teenage mother who has been abandoned by her family because she is having a baby out of wedlock.
As if that’s not already sad enough, her child is stillborn, only adding to the unrelenting heartbreak of this track. Though not the product of personal experience, Parton explained that this sort of situation is common for a lot of young girls, and she wanted to try to tell their story.
“I knew a lot of young girls getting pregnant, and usually in the mountains people would pretty much turn you out: you were trash and a whore and your daddy and mama wouldn’t let you come home, so you’d have to go to some home for unwed mothers or a relative would take you in,” she explained, “I’m touched by everything, and that used to bother me: how cruel and awful must that be, how lonely they must feel.”
‘Daddy Come and Get Me’
There are two elements of this song that are particularly heartbreaking: the first is the actual narrative of the track, which follows a woman who winds up in a psychiatric hospital because she caught her partner cheating, and it crushes her, as she is abandoned by the person she loved, turning to her parents and asks them for support. The other tragic part of the song is implicit, as while listeners might identify with the focal point of the track, it doesn’t actually state whether or not the parents will come to the daughter’s aid.
“We thought, how sad it must be to have to reach out to your father to say, ‘I’m in this mental institution looking out through these iron bars. How could he put me in here? How could he go that far?’”, said Parton when discussing the track, “She couldn’t call on her husband, obviously. You can always count on your parents, although in the song, you can’t tell if the daddy will rescue her or not.”
‘Me and Little Andy’
Interestingly, this is one of Parton’s songs where she may have taken the sentiment a little bit too far. While the track is easily identifiable as sad, there have been a lot of critics who have listened to the song in the past and dismissed it as one that pulls on the heartstrings far too much. It shows that writing something sad is a fine line, as while for a lot of her songs in the past, Parton’s harrowing words have impacted millions, for this track, there were a lot of people who deemed it a step too far, so much so that it became hard to identify with.
Those complaints aside, if we are focusing predominantly on the narratives attached to these songs, as opposed to the critical reception of them, there is no doubt that it’s one of Parton’s most tragic. The story told throughout is that of a little girl who was abandoned by her mother and father, turning up at a stranger’s house with her dog and asking for help, which she is given in the form of food and shelter for the night, and despite the stranger’s seeming kindness, both the child and the dog die later in their sleep.
Perhaps the most efficient way to highlight the public’s reception to such a song can be seen in the fact that when Parton played it at a nightclub in Las Vegas, she was heckled by a drunk man in the audience who asked her to stop. “Don’t sing that damn song in a nightclub!” He said, according to Parton, “It’s bad enough that the kid died! Did you have to kill the damn dog, too?”
‘I Will Always Love You’
When we look at what a lot of the above songs are about, ‘I Will Always Love You’ probably isn’t Parton’s saddest track on offer; however, we have to credit the universal nature of it, and if we are looking for something both sad and timeless, where can we turn other than to one of the most famous portrayals of heartbreak ever laid over music?
This music has scored the drunken, lonely nights of the broken-hearted for decades now, and it will no doubt continue to do the same for years and years to come. It must be recognised as one of her saddest songs, purely because such a depressing theme has reached the hearts of so many.
The song was actually written for her musical mentor, whose career she had surpassed, and the track was supposed to be an emotional farewell to him as she moved on to other ventures. “I wrote that song to say, ‘Here’s how I feel. I will always love you, but I have to go,” the country icon explained.
