Naomi Weisman is a Canadian-Australian and mother of three who loves to Ramble with her dog, cook for family and friends, and laugh whenever possible.
Growing up and coming of age in the 1980s, I had a pretty clear idea of what was cool.
Or at least I thought I did.
There was glam rock, classic rock, big hair, synthesizers, and electric guitars. Country music simply wasn't part of my world. Growing up in Toronto, I didn't hear much of it, and what I did hear, with its unmistakable twang, seemed pretty far removed from the music my friends and I were listening to.
And Dolly Parton? Well, she was very country.
Of course, I knew some of her songs. Islands in the Stream, her duet with Kenny Rogers, was everywhere, and I always loved Jolene. But I thought of Dolly mostly as a country star: enormous hair, rhinestones, that unmistakable voice, and a larger-than-life personality.
I had no idea what was actually behind all of it.
There was something else about Dolly that didn't quite compute for my younger self.
I was raised by a feminist, and I grew up with pretty definite ideas about what a strong, independent woman looked like. Dolly didn't fit that image at all.
The platinum hair. The enormous breasts. The tiny waist. The high heels, makeup, and rhinestones. To me, it seemed like the antithesis of feminism. I had an idea in my head of what an empowered woman was supposed to look like, and Dolly wasn't it.
I couldn't have been more wrong.
Then came The Bodyguard.
In 1992, Whitney Houston released I Will Always Love You, and it was everywhere. That voice. That opening. And then that incredible crescendo. The song was a massive hit and helped send The Bodyguard into the stratosphere.
And then I found out Dolly Parton wrote it!
Wait. Dolly Parton wrote that?
Not only had she written it, but she'd recorded it herself almost 20 years earlier.
That was probably the beginning of my realizing there was much more to Dolly than I'd given her credit for.
I started learning more about her music and discovered what an extraordinary songwriter she was. These weren't simply catchy country songs. She wrote about love, heartbreak, poverty, ambition, jealousy, and people's lives. She was a storyteller.
And the more I learned about her, the more I realized I'd misjudged the woman as much as I'd underestimated the musician.
What I couldn't see when I was younger was that Dolly looked exactly the way Dolly wanted to look. She wasn't dressing for my approval or anyone else's. The hair, the boobs, the makeup, the rhinestones: she chose all of it. She'd created this larger-than-life version of herself and was completely in on the joke.
That changed the way I saw her.
Here was this fiercely individual woman who had built an enormous career in a male-dominated industry, advocated for women, held onto her identity, and turned out to be an extremely savvy businesswoman.
Maybe my younger self's definition of feminism had been a little too narrow.
One of my favourite Dolly stories is about Elvis Presley wanting to record I Will Always Love You. Having Elvis record one of your songs would have been a pretty big deal, but his manager, Colonel Tom Parker, wanted half of the publishing rights.
Dolly said no.
I love that.
Imagine saying no to Elvis because you knew the value of what you'd created.
Then, years later, Whitney Houston recorded the song and turned it into one of the biggest hits of all time. Dolly still owned her song.
She knew exactly what she was doing.
Meanwhile, something else was happening.
I was changing too.
As I got older, my musical tastes expanded. I stopped caring quite so much about what kind of music I was supposed to like and started listening to whatever moved me.
And somewhere along the way, I became a country music lover. Yes. Me. The Toronto girl who once thought country music belonged to a world very different from her own now loves it. In fact, the twangier the better.
And I think that's part of what eventually made me appreciate Dolly so much. She never tried to make herself less country, less feminine, less flamboyant, or less Dolly so that people would take her seriously.
The more I learned about her, the more I liked her.
She grew up poor in rural Tennessee and became one of the world's great songwriters. She understood the business side of what she did and knew the value of owning her work. And then there was her philanthropy, particularly the Imagination Library, which has put millions and millions of books into the hands of children.
All while wearing the wigs, the rhinestones, and the very things my younger self thought meant she couldn't possibly be the kind of woman I'd been raised to admire.
It's funny what happens as we get older. We change our minds.
Music we once overlooked suddenly sounds different. Books mean something different when we reread them. And sometimes people we thought we had figured out turn out to be nothing like the version of them we'd created in our heads.
I think Dolly was one of those people for me.
My teenage self probably wouldn't know what to make of the woman I've become. She listens to country music. Voluntarily. She loves a steel guitar and a Southern drawl. She thinks Jolene is one of the greatest songs ever written. And she has enormous respect for the rhinestone-covered woman from Tennessee she once seriously underestimated.
And now, the world has lost Dolly Parton.
It feels strange to be writing about someone I spent so many years slowly discovering. But I'm also grateful that so much of her is still here.
We have the songs she wrote and the songs she sang. We have the movies, performances, and old interviews. We can still hear that wonderful laugh. And there will be people discovering Jolene, or I Will Always Love You for the first time long after those of us who remember them being released are gone.
I like that.
Dolly left an awful lot behind. Her music, of course, but also her humour, generosity, individuality, and the books she put into children's hands.
And she left the example of a woman who knew exactly who she was.
It just took me a little while to figure her out.
The world lost a very special person this week. I'm grateful that, in so many ways, we get to keep her.
Rest in peace, Dolly.
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