Dolly Parton turns 80 on January 19th, and yet she still has the vitality that characterized her when she came to Nashville from her home in Sevierville, Tennessee in the 1960s. In honor of this milestone birthday, we are publishing – for the first time ever – this interview about the making of her 1971 album “Coat of Many Colors,” which gave the future Country Music Hall of Fame artist her autobiographical signature song. The story originally appeared as part of Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums podcast series.
Dolly Parton has several songs that could be considered her trademark. The warning “Jolene”, the tireless “9 to 5” or the royal ballad “I Will Always Love You”.
But no one comes close to “Coat of Many Colors”. Her autobiographical tale of growing up in poverty in Appalachia and the hand-sewn dresses Parton and her siblings wore to school. The song still evokes strong emotions to this day. Both to the woman who sang it and to the country fans who hear it.
A song as an origin and turning point
At the same time, the song represents Parton’s development into a comprehensive artist. Not just as a singer, but as a songwriter.
“I’ve always tried to evolve, do more, grow and express myself as much as I could musically with every album we’ve made, all while staying true to myself,” Parton tells Rolling Stone. “I always take myself more seriously as a songwriter than as a singer.”
When Parton walked into RCA Studio B to record “Coat of Many Colors” in 1971, she had already been living in Music City for seven years. She had moved to Nashville to be a songwriter, not a singer. But it took time for Nashville to recognize her as a great author.
Porter Wagoner and the path to self-reliance
In Nashville, Parton met a figure who would play a crucial role in her life. Porter Wagoner, a veteran country hitmaker with his own TV variety show. Wagoner gave Parton her break by bringing her onto his show, and the duo became frequent singing partners. They released 13 albums together and won the Country Music Association Award for Vocal Duo of the Year three times. Wagoner even helped Parton select songs and was a dominant presence in the studio.
“Porter was always involved in the production, working with the engineers and musicians and making sure everything sounded the way he wanted,” she says.
Parton ended her musical partnership with Wagoner in 1974 and signed off with the song “I Will Always Love You.” But already during the recording of “Coat of Many Colors” she started to loosen up. To truly find herself as a solo artist and songwriter, Parton knew she would have to write the majority of the album herself—and it all started with the title track, a clear origin story from her childhood in East Tennessee.
Poverty, memory and biblical images
Parton grew up poor in Sevierville, Tennessee, near the Great Smoky Mountains. The memory of the one-room cabin was still fresh when she moved to Nashville in 1964 after graduating from high school. “We had nothing,” she says. “Mom sewed all of our quilts and curtains, altered our clothes or made new ones out of flour sacks or scraps of fabric.”
In “Coat of Many Colors,” Parton sang about this poverty in simple language. The song takes up the biblical story of Joseph and his precious, colorful robe.
“I went to school and thought I looked like Josef,” she says, without realizing that she would be laughed at. “I was angry at my mother and cried because I thought she had lied to me. Mom said, ‘I never want to hear you say we are poor. We are rich in kindness, love and understanding.'”
Writing on the go and getting your first recognition
Grammy-winning songwriter Brandy Clark says “Coat of Many Colors” works so well because it’s universal. “You have family, religion, honesty, poverty and also exclusion,” she says. “If you haven’t experienced at least one of these five things, you probably haven’t lived.”
Parton first wrote the lyrics to “Coat of Many Colors” on a tour bus with Wagoner. The dazzling country star had his suits in a dry cleaning bag, and when inspiration struck, Parton grabbed the pickup slip and began writing. “I just took the label… and wrote ‘Coat of Many Colors’ on it. I basically finished the song on that,” she remembers.
Despite the fact that she recorded some of Wagoner’s songs, Coat of Many Colors is clearly Parton’s album. You can hear her taking control of her own story. Rolling Stone writer Chet Flippo described it as “the first real flowering of Dolly Parton’s still uncertain steps toward a free musical soul and a major songwriter.”
Smoky Mountains, sound and artistic courage
In addition to the title song, she wrote “Traveling Man”, about a young woman who wants to run away with a traveling salesman – until her mother beats him to it. Clark recognizes in this, as in “She Never Met a Man She Didn’t Like,” harbingers of later works. “She worked her way toward ‘Jolene,'” Clark says.
The spirit of the Smoky Mountains permeates the entire album: in the lyrics of the title track, in “Early Morning Breeze,” and in the music of “My Blue Tears,” a bluegrass tune that uses nature as a metaphor for heartbreak. “These songs are like an homage to my home in the Tennessee mountains,” says Parton. “I wanted to capture that old sound.”
Sonically, there is one outlier on the predominantly acoustic album: “Here I Am” is more funk rock than country. It is also the clearest example of how Parton asserts her art. “I wanted to do something more bluesy, something more rocky, and I had to fight a little bit: ‘This isn’t country enough,'” she remembers. “And I thought, ‘Yeah, but it’s soulful.'”
An album as a mission statement
Country singer Carly Pearce, herself an avowed Dolly Parton fan, sees the open secret of Parton’s strength in the simplicity of her lyrics. “She writes incredibly directly,” says Pearce. “When I tend to overcomplicate things, I remind myself that these songs have stood the test of time precisely because they are so simple.”
In the end, this also applies to “Coat of Many Colors”. The album is still essential today because it embodies country music’s mission statement: simple stories that everyone can identify with.
“Coat of Many Colors” peaked at number seven on the Billboard Country Albums chart and earned Parton her first nomination for CMA Album of the Year. Looking back, she says the album fulfilled exactly why she came to Nashville: to be a songwriter. Today she is a global superstar, but the title track remains part of her story – a look at who she was and who she would become. It even became an anthem of gay pride thanks to its themes of acceptance and love.
“I think people just loved the song, and there are a lot of nice little songs on the album,” Parton says. “These are my early days. A lot of my new fans like to go back and look at who I am, who I was. And that little coat – people relate to it for all different reasons.”