Honky-Tonk Weekly
#14: Porter Wagoner & Dolly Parton, "The Party"
This is the fourteenth edition of Honky-Tonk Weekly, a weekly(ish) column here at the Tropical Depression Substack. And okay, it’s been a while, so it’s really not very weekly, but the last two, on Jerry Lee Lewis and Tina Turner, were kind of massive undertakings, so I’ll give myself a pass. Anyway—we’re back! This week we’re partying with Porter Wagoner and Dolly Parton.
You can read previous editions here. Every week, I will listen to and share a country song and write whatever comes to mind. Listen along!
Okay, here is a gorgeous song about the death of children. Or it’s really half a gorgeous song, with Dolly at the peak of her young Dolly phase, about the warmest tones that have ever been sung. Then Porter takes over for the long, slow, gruesome reveal. It is maudlin and sort of hokey, with some of the affect of a Christian youth camp cautionary tale. Country music always had room for this brand of syrup, with Hank Williams establishing the template for sadsack spoken word via his Luke the Drifter records. Porter reads his lines like an elementary school principal who used to dabble in open-mic poetry.
Dolly wrote the song. She was around twenty-one or twenty-two. When I hear her sing during this period, I think of bells and birds and lush grass. Okay, now I’m being hokey, but you know what I mean! It was not just her look but her sui generis voice that made the record companies want to sell her as a sweetheart. And she was sweet! Not saccharine, and nobody’s fool (plus tougher than the boys in the studio could ever guess)—but by all accounts expansively, preternaturally kind. So too with her voice. It diminishes nothing to say that she sang sweetly, because her sweetness was so peculiarly her own. Cozy, angelic, a little spooky.
But also. Yes, yes, she had a great voice and a great look and a kind of genius for stage presence and creating a towering mythos out of her own persona, all that and then some, but also—turns out, she was one of the best songwriters in the history of country music. The studios fed her bubblegum country songs and classic standards, but the best material on those early recordings always wound up being the songs she wrote herself. Her imagination was richer, more detailed and inventive.
And sometimes, much, much darker. “In those early, early days,” she has said, “I used to write a lot of sad ass songs.”
Probably in part because I recently wrote a long piece on murder ballads, I’ve been listening recently to the macabre songs from early in her career, when she penned a number of ballads with dead babies, suicide, arson, throwing rocks at a bride in lieu of rice, and so on. (“Dolly Darko,” my wife said.)1
Why was Dolly focused on dead babies in particular?
Jad Abumrad asked her about it during an interview for the podcast “Dolly Parton’s America.”
JAD: We started talking about how a lot of her early songs are about women losing children.
DOLLY PARTON: I never lost a baby. I’ve never been pregnant in my life. But I’ve seen a lot of people that have, and have had to go through that. I’ve seen it. I've seen the—you know, like I always say, there's two kind of women in the mountains: the kind that get married and have a lot of kids and the kind that stay single and have a lot of kids. [laughs] But I would also write things about people’s lives and topics that I knew that mattered. I was writing about abortion, I was writing about adoption. I was writing about all sorts of things back before it was—when I even wrote a song called “Down From Dover.” About a girl that got pregnant and got sent away from home because she was pregnant, because they wouldn’t accept it.
There’s a biographical detail Dolly doesn’t mention in that interview. Although she never lost a baby of her own, her little brother died as a newborn when she was nine years old. Dolly had eleven siblings and so her mother used to tell older siblings “this one is gonna be your baby” when a new one was on the way. That meant the older sibling would be charged with taking extra care of it, like being on duty to help rock the baby back to sleep in the night.
“I was so excited when she told me that the baby she was carrying was going to be ‘my baby,’” Dolly wrote in her wonderful 1994 memoir. After surviving a potentially deadly bout with spinal meningitis, her mother had a premonition that she would lose the baby. From Dolly’s memoir:
I think it was care for me that made Mama so upset at what she “knew” about the baby she was carrying. She told Daddy that my unborn brother, Larry, would not live. He had been made “my baby,” and she knew it would be harder for me than anyone else. Mama went into labor on July 4, and Larry was born on the fifth. The angels that had spared Mama called little Larry to be with them.
When Daddy came home and told us, I was inconsolable. I remember somebody saying, “Your baby is dead.” I remembered when they had also said, “Your Aunt Marth is dead.” I guess I was angry at God. Why was my baby dead? Why did everything that was mine have to die? I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep. For the first time in my life, I couldn’t sing. I wouldn’t leave Larry’s grave. I would take a lantern up on the hill and sit there more of the night talking to him and crying.
Why did everything that was mine have to die? A child’s question. A grownup’s question.
“The Party” is, ultimately, kind of a funny song. I mean. Come on. I give you permission to laugh. I did.
But there is something true, here, too, about the raw neuroses of motherhood. Especially for the first year or so after birth, my wife often had hyper-vivid visions of catastrophe—baroque day-nightmares with extravagant gore and trauma. She asked around and this seems to be quite common for mothers. Perhaps this is something like a genetic imperative. Babies are so fragile, they need neurotic caretakers to survive. The guilt connected to going to a party and leaving the kiddos with a sitter, also common, could be a mismatch between evolutionary instincts on the savanna and modernity.
Country music is a respite from the Hemingway-addled tastes of modern American culture. Country music is unafraid of melodrama. Hank Williams would sometimes openly weep while doing his Luke the Drifter recordings, which is likewise kind of funny, but also something true. The precedent Hank established for the burgeoning genre had nothing to do with subtlety, or refinement. Country music was the commercial expression of rural folk music, from a time and a place when people had plenty to cry about. The flavor of song they preferred was histrionic and maudlin. Corny, even. And the music has stuck, in part, because even when times got easier, life is still hard, sometimes. We get angry at God. The dramas in our life, small or big, have an unsubtle hold on us. Corny, even.
Sometimes even music doesn’t help. Sometimes it does.
I like to have some melodrama in my queue, me.
“Finally I came to some understanding,” Dolly wrote. “We had a picture of little Larry in his coffin. My family has kept it, and we have always considered him a part of the family. I remember looking at that picture and knowing that the body I was looking at was not my little brother. I remember an old song called ‘That’s Not the Grandpa I Know’ that is about that same thing. I came to think of his spirit as something apart from his body, something not bound to that grave that I kept mourning over but set free to live a perfect existence in heaven. Finally, I got the feeling that Larry wanted me to shut up and let him get some sleep. ‘Get off my grave and get some sleep yourself,’ I thought he was telling me. I took his advice.”
You can find this same description and joke from Grace in the Oxford American piece, as well as Dolly’s take on the influence of murder ballads like “The Knoxville Girl”: “As a songwriter…you gotta remember too that’s how I grew up. All those old mountain songs and all those old songs from the old world. All those old English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh ballads about the Knoxville girl getting killed and throwed in the Knoxville River. And I was very, you know, impressionable.”
This is an excellent article. I really enjoyed reading it. Also, Dolly Parton is a national treasure. 🩷
I used to have one of Dolly's dark songs on the listening list for the old-time, bluegrass and country music course at Brown. Can't recall the title, but it began something like this: "In this mental institution, looking out through iron bars, how could he do this to me, how could he go this far?"