Well hello, Dolly, feminist icon of America

The Backwoods Barbie has endured decades of mockery but her talent and humour ensure she has the last laugh More enduring than Elvis, more accessible than Dylan and a better singer than both, Dolly Parton, who plays Glastonbury for the first time on Sunday, is one of the few pop stars in history who merits the overused word “icon”: she has become an object of veneration representing an unchanging set of beliefs. At a time of uncertainty, America is searching for a definition of itself: a tiny, irrepressible, 68-year-old country singer with famously fake breasts may just be the answer. 

Dolly is about the audacity of hope and the efficacy of cosmetic surgery, the self-made, impenetrably made-up woman, the authentic deep-dyed fake who looks like a plastic hooker but espouses a set of granite moral values: self-reliance, independence and homespun ambition. Her story has been absorbed into American mythology, a rags to rhinestones story that is pure cliché but also happens to be true: the girl with 11 siblings born in a two-room Tennessee shack without running water who now employs more than 3,000 people after selling more than 100 million records; the daughter of an illiterate farmer who grew up with one book in the house (the Bible), but whose Imagination Library now distributes 2.5 million books to children every year. Dolly embodies a set of very American paradoxes: the backwoods Barbie with a formidable business brain, the self-deprecating extrovert, the demure vamp who looks deliberately dim, and knows exactly how clever she is. “I’m not offended by all the dumb blonde jokes.

 I know I’m not dumb. And I’m not blonde.” Above all, the key to Dolly’s survival and success is a very particular brand of American feminism, subtly expressed but remarkable powerful. Country music is not, traditionally, much concerned with gender equality. It is more about standing by your man than standing up to him. An entire sub-section of male country music is devoted to blaming women for heartache (“Since you bought the waterbed, we’ve slowly drifted apart”), treating women as domestic servants and sex objects (“Get your biscuits in the oven, and your buns in the bed”) and claiming not to mind when your woman leaves you (“My wife ran off with my best friend, and I miss him”, “When the phone doesn’t ring, you’ll know it’s from me”, and so on). 

Male failure is a more consistent theme in country music than female success, which is why one should always listen to country music backwards: that way your wife don’t leave you, your dog don’t die, and you wind up sober. But alongside all the chauvinism and male self-pity, country music includes a subversive strain of feminist rebellion reflected in such titles as Did I Shave my Legs for This?, What Part of “No” Don’t You Understand? and The Pill by Loretta Lynn, which may be only song ever written in celebration of birth control. Dolly is a central pillar of this tradition, challenging country music sexism at every opportunity, with sung stories in which women decline to be pushed around by men. Nine to Five is an anthem of female equality (“Tumble outta bed and I stumble to the kitchen/ Pour myself a cup of ambition”) in direct defiance of male discrimination (“You’re just a step on the boss man’s ladder/ But you got dreams he’ll never take away”). 

In Just Because I’m a Woman, she sent up male double standards, mocking men who judge women for their past sexual experiences while bragging of their own. (“Now a man will take a good girl/ And he’ll ruin her reputation/ But when he wants to marry/ Well, that’s a different situation”). In Coat of Many Colours she sang of a girl bullied at school for wearing clothes made from patched rags. In Dagger Through the Heart, a woman’s emotions are “tossed around like a box of used crayons”. The Dolly look is itself a calculated deflation of sexism, a standing joke about male chauvinist expectations. 

She may look like a male fantasy of female sexual availability (frozen in about 1968), but her image is entirely owned and controlled by her. She flirts wildly, but remains faithful to the road-laying contractor she married in 1966. She is happy to appear on the cover of Playboy, but would never take her clothes off. No man can mock her body, because she has elevated self-mockery to an art form. She owns the joke: “It takes a lot of money to look this cheap.” 

After 60 years on stage and more than 3,000 songs, Dolly is no longer simply a performer, but an idea: about overcoming poverty and discrimination through self-reliance and humour. Dollyisms have become a part of the language. Kenneth Clarke once accused Gordon Brown of indulging in Dolly Parton economics: “An unbelievable figure blown out of all proportion, with no visible means of support.” 

Country music is frequently dismissed as sentimental schmaltz (as much of it is), but at its best it is the authentic musical argot of American life. Much of Bill Clinton’s appeal lay in his ability to speak in fluent country music lyrics. So when Dolly takes the stage on Sunday, she will sing some old songs and tell some old jokes as if she had just thought of them, but she will also be reasserting a cultural statement that is much older, and quintessentially American: a rebuttal of time, a refusal to grow old. An indestructible part of the American dream, Dolly is the living embodiment of the possibilities of renewal and reinvention, a monument in word, song and silicone.