The country singer Dolly Parton crowned as the “coolest guy”
Dolly Parton didn’t get into the country music industry looking to be the coolest artist in the world.
Anyone that ever tried to write their own songs on Music Row was going there because they wanted something to express, and whenever you hear one of Parton’s greatest tunes, you can hear her trying to make the songs that she can based on where she is at whatever point in her life. But even in the most wholesome genre that the world had ever known at the time, Parton felt like some country artists could manage to look effortlessly cool whenever they wrote their hits.
Then again, it’s not exactly hard to get a country rocker to have a bit of swagger in their step. The cowboy persona was always going to be right there for the taking, and while there’s nothing the least bit threatening about someone like Porter Wagoner whenever he came onstage, you could definitely feel a sense of danger whenever someone like Johnny Cash took the stage. ‘The Man in Black’ was a country singer with a rock and roll heart, and you can feel that energy in a lot of the songs he sang.
But Parton was something different. She didn’t aim to be one of the biggest badasses in the world, and a lot of her songs were about caring about those closest to her or heartwrenching tunes about a romance gone bad. If someone did cross her, though, she was willing to put everything she had on the line to make sure that she stuck to her principles at every single opportunity.
I mean, just look at the brief spat that she had with Elvis Presley’s management when they tried to get her to give ‘I Will Always Love You’ to ‘The King’. Getting a co-sign from one of the biggest stars in American music would have been a godsend for any other artist, but Parton wasn’t about to let someone walk all over her songwriting credits. She still had standards for what she wanted to do, and if she was going to be remembered for anything, it was for writing her own songs rather than giving someone else a slice of what she was doing.
After all, that’s what a lot of her heroes had been doing. Sure, there were still artists who covered some of their favourite songs on record, but everyone from George Jones to Johnny Cash to Loretta Lynn had started to write their own material with a much more personal angle to everything. And when Parton made it to the top of the country world, she was paying close attention to what Roger Miller was doing.
Miller might be one of the faces of classic country, but Parton was struck by his demeanour as much as she was by his songs, saying, “I had always wanted to meet him because everyone was talking about him. Everybody loved him. They always said that he was the coolest guy and he was. He was the most laid-back. He was so laid-back that he might as well have laid down. But he was so smooth and cool and friendly. I remember when I first met him I just thought that he reeks of all good things.”
And when you look at the track record that Parton had for writing slice-of-life songs, a lot of it comes from the kind of music that Miller was so good at. She might have come to enjoy his music after having a few songs under her belt, but the kind of smooth demeanour in ‘King of the Road’ was enough to get any country singer to try their hand at making that sounded that laid-back whenever they made their songs.
It’s one thing to get country audiences crying along to the heart-wrenching stories that they hear, but Miller’s strengths have rubbed off on everyone from Parton to Don Henley when you really take the time to dissect their music. All of them are looking to have an effect on people, but it’s sometimes a lot easier to have songs that people can relax to rather than get too emotional while listening to them.
