Author Spent Nearly A Decade Researching Dolly Parton’s Songwriting

This conversation was originally published in the Sept. 6, 2026, episode of Inside Appalachia.

Dolly Parton recorded more than 1,000 songs, but crucially, she was also a songwriter who wrote more than 3,000 songs, including tracks that were recorded by many, many others.

Lydia Hamessley is a professor of music at Hamilton College in New York and the author of Unlikely Angel, The Songs of Dolly Parton. She spent nearly a decade researching Dolly’s music catalog.

Inside Appalachia Associate Producer Abby Neff talked with Hamessley. 

The transcript below was lightly edited for clarity.

Neff: What makes Dolly Parton’s songwriting so memorable? 

Hamessley: [Dolly Parton] said she wanted to be primarily known as a songwriter rather than all the other ways we know her. And I think what makes her songwriting so memorable is two things that are related. One, she is an excellent storyteller. So, she can just keep you hooked from the first moment of a song, with what the story is and how it’s developing. But what’s connected to that is that, [two], the stories she tells have both a very specific angle, but also have a kind of general quality about them that you can put yourself into the song.

I can give you an example. Take Coat of Many Colors. That song, which she said was her favorite song of all of her songs that she’s done, she makes it general enough so that anybody can relate to it, even if you didn’t have a little coat that was made out of rags. At some point, somebody made fun of you for something you were wearing, or you had just gotten braces or glasses, or your hair got cut in a dumb way or whatever. We’ve all been teased about something that’s an attribute of ourselves.

And so she can take a really specific event and yet generalize it enough that invites the listener to be in the song with her. 

Neff: What were some of the big influences on her songwriting? 

Hamessley: When I had a chance to ask her some questions, one of the things I wanted to know, because no one ever asked her these questions, was “what fiddle tunes did you hear?” Or, “what ballads did your mom sing to you?” And she could just reel off those names of fiddle tunes and ballads. Oh, “mama sang this, and this, and this,” and she hadn’t gotten those questions that much. This was what she was still carrying around with her. And her grandfather was a Pentecostal preacher, so she grew up in the church there. And of course, the church music was so influential for her as well.

So between the church music, her mother singing ballads and also parlor songs, things they might have heard on a radio and fiddle tunes and dancing, flat footing, that sort of thing. She said that music was part of her Smoky Mountain DNA.

She actually has this great quote she said once that when she was first starting out in Nashville, and she had big dreams, she wanted to make it big, and she said, [she] couldn’t make a living singing those kinds of songs, those country songs like Coat of Many Colors or the more Appalachian sense of a song. She said, [she] couldn’t make a living doing that. But then later, when she recorded her bluegrass albums or included more of that music, she said, “I had to get rich in order to sing like I was poor.”

And so she is connecting her childhood poverty, which was enormous, with that music. And that was the sound of her childhood and the sound of poverty. And that’s the music she felt like she performed the best, sang the best, she sounded the best, and that was the closest to her heart. 

Neff: She’s a very great performer. I think that’s one thing that I find really beautiful with her music, is not only her songwriting, but her ability to perform it. Just the sincerity in her voice. Not many artists can do that. 

Hamessley: She can sound sometimes very sweet and angelic and very pure, but she can also belt and go into that full-throated, mountain sound, very straight tone and powerful. One song your listeners might be interested in hearing is called These Old Bones. It’s a song that Dolly plays two roles in. She plays a young woman and an old, witchy woman in the mountains who, I don’t want to give away too much of the story, but who turns out to be important in the young woman’s life. The witchy woman sounds like somebody like Hazel Dickens, you know. It has that kind of quality, even more so, if you can imagine. 

So when Dolly’s singing with a young woman, she sounds like Dolly. And when she sings the witchy woman, she goes into that voice. And it’s authentic. And some listeners don’t like it, as you can imagine, but it’s terrific. And she said she modeled that voice on her mother. And that when she recorded that song, she felt like she was singing with her mother. And she actually had them turn the lights down in the studio. She said, “I don’t want people looking at me. I’ve got to get into this zone and sing with my mother.”

And the song ends, again, I won’t give away the story, but the song ends with the two voices singing simultaneously. 

Neff: How often did you speak with Dolly?

Hamessley: I just had the chance to do that once. She took the interview very seriously. She was upbeat and she giggled a few times. But there was no joking around. There was no boob jokes. There was none of that Dollyism. She was on point.

What I found particularly moving in listening to the beginning of the interview again, she said, “I think it’s wonderful you want to write a book about my music,” and then she said, “but I don’t know that I’m worthy of all that.” I’m like, are you kidding? But then she just went on and said, “but I’m going to answer your questions, and so here we go.” 

Neff: Your book, Unlikely Angel, you published in 2020, right? How long did you take to research? 

Hamessley: The acquisitions editor at the University of Illinois Press, which is well known for its American music catalog, asked me if I would do a book on Dolly, and I agreed. And I believe that was in 2011. And I remember feeling so overwhelmed, and I just had to break it down and start small. And so what I did was I had a list of all of her albums chronologically, and I just sat down and put the first one on. I was sitting at my computer, and I would listen and I would kind of just take notes, my own feeling about the song or what she’s doing, and then go to the next album.

But what I found when I went through that way was, I’ve heard this before, not the same song, but I’ve heard her tell a similar story. I gotta go back, you know? And so I found these thru-threads that she had of different ideas and sometimes music. I would hear things and think, well, that’s the same melody. Or at least it’s really similar to something else. 

Neff: Yeah, I think Coat of Many Colors and Wildflowers with the Trio, that has a similar melody. 

Hamessley: That was one thing I asked her about. And she said, “oh yeah, I sometimes reuse my melodies,” and that was one time she kind of giggled because she said, “sometimes I write something and I think, that sounds familiar,” and then she said she makes sure it’s always herself. She said, “I don’t steal from anybody else, but I steal from myself.” And then she kind of giggled and said, “but I can’t sue myself.”

Her producer, Steve Buckingham, I had interviewed him and had brought him up to Hamilton College to talk to my students and all. He called me up and said, “oh, I just talked to the subject of your book.” And of course, I started shaking. And he said she’s really excited about it, and that what she had said was, “this is great. This could be good for my legacy.”

I think she was at an age when she thought, let’s get some of this kind of nailed down. 

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Learn more about Unlikely Angel, The Songs of Dolly Parton by Lydia Hamessley.