In the Mix: Dolly Parton 1946-2026

Dolly Parton died in Nashville on Tuesday at the age of eighty, and this week In The Mix gives the whole hour to her — not to the wigs and the nails, which she deployed as a very effective decoy for sixty years, but to the thing she insisted on every time somebody credited the wrong one. She reckoned she wrote about three thousand songs, and she said flatly that it was the songwriting, not the look, that got her out of the Smoky Mountains. We open with a song she wrote at seventy-six about a girl leaving home for Nashville with nothing, because she’d done exactly that on the second of June, 1964, the day after she finished high school. There’s the honest song about the poverty rather than the sentimental one. There’s “Coat of Many Colors”, the favourite of everything she wrote. And there’s “The Letter” — ninety seconds of Dolly reading out, word for word, the letter she posted home to her parents on her first night in the city.

Then the rest of a life that kept turning refusals into something larger. Porter Wagoner, who made her and wouldn’t let her grow, and the goodbye note she wrote him in 1973 on the same day she wrote “Jolene”. Elvis Presley wanting that goodbye note, and Colonel Tom Parker demanding half the publishing, and a woman from a house with no electricity saying no and crying all the way home — and being proved spectacularly right eighteen years later. The fingernail percussion on “9 to 5”. The Bee Gees. Trio. Being told at fifty she was too old for country radio and answering with a bluegrass album that won a Grammy. Being nominated for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and trying to turn it down. Singing on a Sabrina Carpenter record at seventy-nine, with conditions. And the two hundred million free books she posted to children because her father never learned to read. We end where she ended — with the four words she used to say goodbye to Porter in 1973, and used again last year to say goodbye to her husband.

Broadcast 26 August 2026