All about Dolly

This 1999 article by Stephanie Zancharek, Salon's film critic, is one of the best recent summaries of Dolly Parton's career. I just got The Essential Dolly Parton, most of which is extraordinary: songs sung with an intelligence and generosity that matches her self-composed melodies and lyrics:

I'd say that of all her country contemporaries, living or dead, Parton is the most sensuous. Her voice has so much shimmering life to it, as well as a kind of voluptuousness -- it's the voice of someone who's eager to take everything in. Even if Parton sometimes sings of restraint, her music is never about repression. That's confirmed by the way she writes about sex in her autobiography: "All my life ... I have been driven by three things; three mysteries I wanted to know more about; three passions. They are God, music and sex. I would like to say that I have listed them in the order of their importance to me, but their pecking order is subject to change without warning."

Amen.