“I’ve always been true to myself,” she says. She must have had real strength of character as a young woman to defy people, including later in her recording career, when record label executives wanted her to tone down her look. It says, ‘I was gonna be rich no matter how much it cost / And I was going to win no matter how much I lost / Down through the years I’ve kept my eye on the prize / And you ask if it’s worth the sacrifice.’ I think it is, for me.” But sometimes there’s just that part of you that’s willing, if you want something bad enough, to go for it.” She wrote a song years later, she says – The Sacrifice, on her 2011 album Better Day – “and it kind of sums it up. “I’m very sensitive, I didn’t like being disciplined – it hurt my feelings so bad to be scolded or whipped or whatever. Her grandfather, a preacher, and father, a sharecropper, both hated the way she dressed her grandfather would even physically punish her. When people would say, ‘She ain’t nothing but trash,’ I would always say, ‘Well, that’s what I’m gonna be when I grow up.’” She had high-heeled shoes, little floating plastic goldfish in the heels of them, short skirts, low-cut tops, and I just thought she was beautiful. She had bright red lipstick, long red fingernails. Parton has always been sure of her look, even when she was young, a look – as she has said before – modelled on the “town tramp”, a local woman who wore high heels and tight skirts, who Parton would look out for on trips into town. ‘You look back on it, like, what was I thinking?’ Parton in 1978.

Blond hair that gets bigger and bigger, like a cake rising jumpsuits in every colour dresses weighed down with rhinestones and pearls. “At the time you think you look good, then you look back on it, like, what was I thinking?” She laughs, but the book is wonderful, documenting the dresses made from sacks she wore as a child, and her “coat of many colours”, sewn by her mother from fabric scraps, to the most lavish stage costumes. “I’ve been at this so long, I’ve worn some of the most bizarre things – my hairdos have always been so out there,” she says. Her roar of freedom, when you know the legend of her life story – the impoverished girl who grew up in the backwoods of Tennessee, defied all expectations and grew up to be the all-conquering country star – is made for it.Īs well as the album, Parton is releasing a new book, Behind the Seams: My Life in Rhinestones, which documents her life and career in clothes and costume (next, she is planning the small matter of launching a TV network). I didn’t want to maim them up, and I tried really hard to sing them well and stay as true as I could to the form, but with my voice.” Her version of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Free Bird is, I think, even better than the original. Recording these classic rock songs – the playlist is inspired largely by the favourites of Parton’s husband of nearly 50 years, Carl, “a real rock’n’roll freak” – has been “a big deal for me, and I felt very responsible. Parton performing with Elton John at the Country Music Association awards in 2005. I pray that every day God will bring all the right things, all the right people, into my life.” “God has always blessed me, surrounded me with good people. “I’ve been grateful for every good thing ever happened,” she says. She is also luminous, as sometimes very famous people are, but with her it’s something else. Not remotely grand, she is warm and funny, skilled at deflecting awkward questions with a joke. It is busy with assistants, bodyguards and publicists, though when I’m shown into a room where Parton, queenly, is to receive me – everything timed to the second – we are left alone. We meet in an expensive hotel in London where Parton has taken over the top floor. And so, at the age of 77, Parton became a rock star. The album, Rockstar, Parton’s 49th, started with her inauguration to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which she initially felt unworthy of because she didn’t consider herself an artist in that genre. It’s not just the ageing greats – Lizzo is there too, on Stairway to Heaven. She sings Let it Be with Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, with Mick Fleetwood on drums and Peter Frampton on guitar she has Debbie Harry and Stevie Nicks, Joan Jett and Judas Priest’s Rob Halford. You don’t, I suspect, say no to Dolly Parton, which is why the roll call of names on her new rock album is so ridiculous.

Rockstar outfit for ladies