Conference Agenda

Songwriters with a long career face a particular challenge: how can they make their music sound current and relevant when songwriting changes so substantially over time, whether in instrumentation, arrangement techniques, and topics, or fundamental musical structures? Those aspects of songwriting are not commonly discussed by fans, but they are every bit as distinctive a marker of a songwriter’s approach to making music as their unique turns of phrase and vocal cadence. And that fact poses a challenge for songwriters such as Dolly Parton: how do they make their music remain commercially viable within the ever-evolving soundscape of country music while still adhering to their individually distinctive style?

Today’s commercial, radio-marketed country music is almost always the collective product of a large team of songwriters working together. For instance, Billboard’s “Hot Country Songs” Top 10 the week of February 15, 2025 features songs written by teams comprised of between three and eleven individuals. This approach is largely a shift in how songwriting credits acknowledge different types of creative work in the contemporary studio. For our analytic purposes, however, the end result is that the team-based approach to songwriting obscures the distinctive markers of any one songwriter, and the ever-shifting roster of contributors means that the team’s output can keep up with current trends more easily: new co-writers continually bring fresh ideas not only in melody and lyrics but also in harmonic syntax, song form, and structure.

Dolly Parton, by contrast, has marketed her public identity as a singer-songwriter very consistently in recent years, releasing three albums of self-penned songs in a row during the past decade. Whereas she drew on a large stable of songwriters in the late 1970s and 1980s for her repertory, this more recent approach eschews those types of collaborations. This paper demonstrates how Parton’s songwriting process as a solo writer manifests in distinctive and audible song forms and structural features that harken back to her early 1960s songwriting, imbuing her music with an inherent nostalgia, but simultaneously hampering her music’s commercial reception.

We focus on Dolly Parton’s voice and her expressive vocal strategies across her immense catalog. Informed by scholarship on vocal anatomy and the ways that the female voice changes through a lifetime, we offer close readings of a few key songs, particularly those in which she articulates the experiences of girls and women. We consider Parton’s storytelling strategies, her vocal techniques, and the ways in which they intersect.

In “Puppy Love” (1959), her first recorded single, a teenage Parton gives voice to budding sexuality, through a character on the brink of her first crush, singing with a bright and brash timbre. She evokes a different child-like voice in later songs like “Me and Little Andy (1977), where a thin, wispy delivery conjures the haunting voice of a young orphan. In her mid-career, Parton voices women’s empowerment through songs like “Working Girl” (1980) and “9 to 5” (1980). In these songs, Parton’s voice is full-throated and powerful, giving literal and figurative volume to the stories of working women. Finally, in “These Old Bones” (2002), Parton inhabits the roles of both adult daughter and her “witchy” mother in a story about fear of women’s wisdom. Parton shifts her vocal character, using her own mother’s Appalachian vocal sound to embody the role of a “mountain woman.”

Although its transitions are less dramatic than those affecting male voices, the female vocal apparatus does change at puberty and again at menopause. Parton’s voice, renowned in country music and beyond for its agility, clarity of tone, and vocal range, has undergone these changes, but it has remained a central aspect of her musical persona. In contrast to other women country singers such as Tammy Wynette or Patsy Cline, Parton’s discography spans decades, from her teens to her late seventies, offering an unusual opportunity to examine the life of a remarkable voice. By understanding Parton’s voice—how it has changed throughout her career and how she uses her voice to inflect her songs and characters with meaning—it becomes clear that Parton’s voice is a key compositional tool used by one of the US’s most prolific songwriters.

Not long ago, many Dolly Parton vinyl albums from the 1960s and 1970s had never been reissued. It felt impudent to claim, as I did in my book Top 40 Democracy (2014), that for all the rhetoric sanctifying Hank Williams, Parton better exemplified country music. Well. The battle to secure a pantheon spot for this songwriter, performer, and celebrity appears over, given the recent deluge of Parton books and podcasts, her Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction, naming by Billboard as the greatest country artist of all time, and the selection of Coat of Many Colors by Rolling Stone as the greatest country album.

But that invites a follow-up question: what changed about our cultural pantheon to make Parton’s centrality now seem staggeringly obvious? The earlier country canon, as traced by Diane Pecknold in The Selling Sound and Joli Jensen in The Nashville Sound, positioned Williams and kindred figures as authentic forces who chafed at commercialization, whose legacy kept genre traditions unbroken even as country as an industry format incorporated pop techniques. My argument is that Parton has attained her new status because she did not position her authenticity in the same way; going pop was central to her journey.

Johnny Cash aligned by marriage with the mountain purity of the Carter Family—Pa­rton godmothered Miley Cyrus after touring with and ogling Billy Ray. Loretta Lynn was rooted in a song, memoir, and film all called Coal Miner’s Daughter—Parton made camp of heritage in a YouTube clip where she and soul singer Patti LaBelle sang “Shortnin’ Bread” to the beat of their acrylic nails. Parton has covered “Purple Rain” and appeared on Beyoncé albums. But she also funded libraries and paid to fight Covid. This unapologetic self-marketer, songwriter, and Tennessee license plate staple proved an omnivore’s ideal. That mixology, not songs alone, explains her recent primacy. As country battled over its red state appeal and white bros hogging the airwaves, the pop-infused Parton, by contrast, became a new symbol of cultural attainment.