The one song Dolly Parton said gave her a career: “New girl in town”
There’s a good chance that Dolly Parton could have easily become one of the greatest country singers of all through sheer charm alone.
The fact that she was able to make wholesome music was her greatest strength, but over her decades of being in show business, most people have fallen in love with the kind of person she was behind the scenes just as much as they are enamoured with tunes like ‘Jolene’ and ‘9 to 5’. But if it weren’t for her humble beginnings, she would have probably ended up still playing the bar circuit without the right songs in her repertoire.
Because when Parton was first cutting her teeth, Nashville was already a musical institution. No one was making music that didn’t have the best singer, songwriter, and session musicians on it, and even though Parton had an uphill battle by writing her own material, she was more than happy to play the game and start working on songs with people like Porter Wagoner when she first got the call to work with him.
It was going to take a lot of woodshedding before getting her first album out, and while she did have a lot of country standards to choose from, Hello I’m Dolly isn’t exactly the best thing she ever made. There’s hardly any Dolly Parton that doesn’t have that same spirit to it, but when looking through all of the songs, even the queen of country music had to admit that there were a few songs that were clearly written with a teenage-level experience of songwriting.
But ‘Dumb Blonde’ was pretty much what sealed the deal for Wagoner when he first heard her tunes. The song was far from the most adventurous tune in the world, and it was nowhere near tunes like ‘I Will Always Love You’, but the kind of attitude that Parton put into every one of those lines was enough for her to get her foot in the door and become Wagoner’s partner behind the scenes.
And even years later, Parton cited ‘Dumb Blonde’ as the song that got her her big break, saying, “It was that song that got the attention of Porter Wagoner, who had the number-one syndicated country show in the nation. He had the girl singer who had been a big star on the show. She was going to move back to Oklahoma City, so he’d seen me on TV and there was talk around town about this new girl in town. That was me. That was what really got me over the moon and really started it all for me, big time.”
Any other artist would consider that the apex of their career, but Parton had her eye on something bigger after she and Wagoner worked together. Both of them were very headstrong about how they wanted their songs to go, and by the time Parton was ready to go off on her own, it wasn’t like she needed his help anymore. She was a country legend in her own right, and it was time for her to spread her wings and get a taste of what the rest of the world was doing.
That reputation may have taken a few dents when she made a transition to working with pop producers and songwriters, but there’s no way anyone can look at ‘Here You Come Again’ and not think it’s a country classic. It wasn’t written by a Nashville songwriting team by any stretch, but you can’t take that kind of country spirit out of Parton, whether she was singing a ballad or recently when she worked with a bunch of rockstars.
So while Parton’s career is second only to people like Johnny Cash in the country music industry, ‘Dumb Blonde’ is a lot more indicative of how she viewed the rest of her life in Nashville. The line ‘this dumb blonde ain’t nobody’s fool’ is still one of the best lines she ever wrote, and given the doors she opened for other female artists, she birthed a whole new generation of singers that weren’t going to take shit from any of their male counterparts.
