By Dolly Parton, who died last week at 80, was something like an American secular saint, founding nonprofit foundations to address social ills and quietly doing good deeds on behalf of private individuals who wrote to her asking for help. I never met her. But my mother, a singer-songwriter and music teacher, did, briefly.
It happened in the mid-1970s when she moved out to Nashville to try to make it in the country music business after the country great Chet Atkins mentored her and produced her first and only album, Passages, which was shelved by her label RCA Records after the first single from her album, “The Girl from Prairie Flats,” failed to appear on Billboard’s Top 40 Country Singles list.
That adventure didn’t work out for her, but she met a lot of then-superstars, including Dolly, Dolly’s ex-husband Porter Wagoner, Loretta Lynn, Kenny Rogers (who officially pivoted from rock to country in 1976, soon after Mom landed in Nashville), and the baritone-voiced Tennessee Ernie Ford, who booked her on a TV special. Bettye Pierce Zoller was her stage name.
During her Nashville period, she was simply called Bettye Pierce (Zoller, she was told euphemistically, didn’t sound “country enough”). She borrowed “Pierce” from my biological father, pianist and composer David Pierce Zoller, aka Dave Zoller, another family member I’ve written about at RogerEbert.com.
Country wasn’t Mom’s native musical idiom—growing up in Kansas City, Kansas, she’d won awards in high school for her musical theater performances. After graduating from the University of Missouri at Kansas City (where she met Dad, then a TA in a composition class), she mastered different forms of music, both solo and in partnership with Dad: show tunes, American songbook standards, jazz, rock.
Photo of “The Girl from Prairie Flats,” a country music single written by Bettye Pierce and Becky Dye and performed by Pierce. Originally released as a promotional single in 1976.
Her fascination with country came mainly from Dolly Parton’s international success starting in the early 1970s. Dolly was one of Mom’s role models, as a performer, a businessperson, and an independent woman who found a way to do things her way, even though society at large was a boy’s club, and country music only slightly less of one.
My relationship with my mother was stormy at best. I went into the details here, in a post published after her death in 2021. The short version: she had drug and alcohol problems her whole life, earned pretty substantial amounts from radio commercials and then blew it all on substances (and clothes, and vacations, and a couple of times, cars). She had a streak of malignant narcissism that later struck both my brother and myself as undiagnosed mental illness.
Visiting mom in the psychiatric ward near the end of her life, where she was detoxing from cocaine before moving into a memory care facility, I asked her if she ever wondered if she was mentally ill, and if so, whether she sought a medical diagnosis. The answers were yes and no, respectively. The yes was because Mom knew her extreme behavior wasn’t considered healthy. The no was because if she got a diagnosis, then she’d have had to face the reality that she was what she feared she was. It was a head-in-the-sand approach to the problem. In our own, hopefully less self-destructive ways, we’ve all been there.
As an adult, I was envious of anyone who had a close and emotionally healthy relationship with their mother and genuinely enjoyed being around them. Mom and I went through a ten-year period when we didn’t speak at all, following several spectacular instances of unconscionable behavior toward my first wife, her sister, and their extended family, who never showed her anything but patience and courtesy.
When she died in April of 2021—officially of dementia, but really from a cumulative lifetime of abusing her body—I was bereft. It’s an infuriating truth that sometimes the deaths of relatives we had unpleasant relationships with hit us harder than the deaths of those who didn’t burden us in that way. Psychologists call it a “complicated loss.”
I had already started listening to Dolly Parton again quite heavily in the years preceding her death, in heavy rotation with music by other performers she admired. In the weeks before Mom died, Dolly became my default.
“A Coat of Many Colors” was the one I listened to the most. It made me cry. At first, the tears were for the relationship I didn’t have with Mom but wish I had. Drawn from Dolly’s childhood, the song is about a poor country girl whose mama sews her a coat from mismatched materials because the family can’t afford to go to a store and buy her something new. She sings:
“Mama sewed the rags together
Sewin’ every piece with love
She made my coat of many colors
That I was so proud of
As she sewed, she told a story
From the Bible she had read
About a coat of many colors
Joseph wore and then she said
“Perhaps this coat will bring you
Good luck and happiness”
And I just couldn’t wait to wear it
And Mama blessed it with a kiss.”
Mean kids at school make fun of the girl’s coat because it’s evidence of the family’s poverty. But to the narrator, it’s evidence of her mother’s perseverance, ingenuity, and love. She couldn’t understand it, she says,
“For I felt that I was rich
And I told ’em of the love
My mama sewed in every stitch
And I told ’em all the story
Mama told me while she sewed
And how my coat of many colors
Was worth more than all their clothes.”
Everybody has subcategories of movies that they gravitate towards for personal reasons. One of mine is movies in which a mother is unabashedly adored by their kids and, judging from the way the mother is presented, the movie adores her as well. Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life’ is a movie like that. So is Terence Davies’ “The Long Day Closes,” and Alan Parker’s film version of Frank McCourt’s memoir of Irish poverty “Angela’s Ashes.” Plus “Almost Famous,” “Stepmom,” “Places in the Heart,” and any adaptation of “Little Women.” You can probably think of a few more.
Well, for me, watching those movies was an exercise in blissful masochism. I had no idea what it would’ve felt like to have a relationship with my mother like the ones in those movies, where mom is a radiant force for good and doesn’t let her demons get the better of her because she doesn’t have any. Watching movies built around those types of mothers was the emotional equivalent of being able to vicariously visit, through cinema, a place I didn’t get to see when it existed and that was gone by the time I saw the film. “The Coat of Many Colors” tells that kind of story. The narrator’s mama adored her when she was a child, and as an adult she still adores her, with good reason.
Then, a couple of days after Mom died, I spoke to a friend, a younger writer, about a piece he was working on, and we got into the subject of literary voice. I felt he was in danger of embarrassing himself by conflating the point-of-view of a mostly awful movie character with the point-of-view of the movie itself. (The film was “The Wolf of Wall Street,” by Martin Scorsese, who has made a lot of movies that invoke the phrase “depiction does not equal endorsement.” I gave him a few reasons why I believed the movie was aware of the protagonist’s venality, cruelty, and toxic self-centeredness (such as the way his narration seems to skip over horrible incidents that he was directly involved with, such as a coworker’s death by suicide). “Don’t mistake the voice of the character for the voice of the artist,” he said.
And then I felt a chill, because I realized who taught me that: Mom.
Mom had an office in her house, really a tiny room that was of no other practical use. She had an upright piano in there, a small bookshelf, a small desk, and a stereo unit hooked up to one of those record players that could stack vinyl LPs and drop them one by one onto the turntable. I’d go in there sometimes and choose a record almost at random from Mom’s collection. I heard a lot of great music for the first time that way. Joni Mitchell’s Blue, The Beatles’ White Album, Ray Charles’ Genius + Jazz = Soul and Sweet and Sour Tears, Dolly’s Just Because I’m a Woman and Here You Come Again and, of course, A Coat of Many Colors (which doubled as an album title).
There were also singles in there, one-offs that Mom bought, I guess you could say, out of respect: she’d heard the song over and over on the radio, loved it every time, and wanted to compensate the artists by putting a little money in their pockets. One was Dave Loggins’ 1974 song “Please Come to Boston,” about a “ramblin’ man” who keeps shrugging off the entreaties of a woman who’s in love with him and just wants him to recognize that he’d be much happier if he’d leave the road and “settle down” with her.
Mom had me play that one a couple of times because she wanted me to appreciate how the narrator keeps trying to insist on love on his own terms (asking the woman to join him in Boston, Denver, and Los Angeles), and how the story of the song remains unresolved. Did he finally settle down, or did he keep rambling? We don’t know.
We listened to a lot of songs that way. It wasn’t a set thing. Usually I’d listen with headphones on for a couple of hours while she watched TV or exercised. But sometimes she’d come into the office, look at the record, and suddenly start smiling and tap me on the shoulder, the signal to take the headphones off so she could tell me something about the music.
I learned about unreliable and/or unstable narrators by listening to music with Mom. Some examples included “Mack the Knife,” recorded by many artists but written for Bertolt Brecht’s “The Threepenny Opera”; Steven Sondheim’s “A Little Priest,” from Sweeney Todd, one of the most joyous songs ever written about serial killing and cannibalism; Bessie Smith’s “Send Me to the ‘Lectric Chair,” sung by a woman who has zero regrets about killing her cheating husband (banned from ever being played on BBC Radio); The Rolling Stones’ “Under My Thumb,” in which the narrator brags about his success at breaking a strong willed woman and making her subservient, and “Brown Sugar,” about the many horrors of slavery, though told from the point-of-view of a person who seems excited by them rather than disapproving (finally pulled from their setlist in 2021); Randy Newman’s “Rednecks,” about a Southern racist calling out Northern political hypocrisy.
Listening to music with Mom is how I learned that songs specifically about songwriting are a form of “metafiction” (a word coined in 1970 by writer William Gass) and that the prefix can be joined to a noun to describe something mainly about the thing it exemplifies. The Four Tops’ “Same Old Song,” Billy Joel’s “Piano Man,” Elton John and Bernie Taupin’s “Writing” and “Your Song,” Barry Manilow’s “I Write the Songs,” and so on. When I went to college and studied creative writing, I took particular interest in metafiction because, thanks to Mom’s explanations, the idea intrigued me.
And then there was Dolly. Through Mom, I came to understand that much of her music was as aspirational as it was inspirational, and that she left things out so we could fill them in ourselves. “A Coat of Many Colors” doesn’t end by telling us that the narrator now enjoys a life free from want, but that a certain incident in her past gave her the mindset to appreciate gifts that come from love, not money; it’s up to us to imagine what that coat led to. “Two Doors Down” catches a woman at the end of an old life (leaving a bad relationship) and what might be the start of a new one, though the song leaves us with just a seed of hope, and we have to imagine how it will or won’t grow.
It was Mom’s thoughts on the Dolly Parton-Porter Wagoner collaboration “Jeannie’s Afraid of the Dark” that helped me understand that a song, like a poem, could suddenly turn on the audience and inflict pain (Jeannie is an only child afraid of death, and in the end, the narrators, her parents, reveal that she died.) Edgar Allan Poe wrote many poems like that.
After I finished the phone call with my writer friend, I sat for a long time and thought about all the things my mother taught me about music, narration, point of view, and different modes of storytelling across different media. She didn’t make a point of instructing me. It happened organically, through my own explorations. I understood what she told me and carried it with me throughout school and then into my career as a critic. I wouldn’t be where I am today without the lessons my Mom taught me.
Would I have preferred to have a mother who was always there for me, who was warm and empathetic, and put the needs of myself and my brother first, who managed money effectively so we weren’t always scrambling to pay bills at the last minute and begging family friends for loans, and who wasn’t constantly fighting one form of addiction or another? Sure. But that didn’t happen, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it now, so it seems pointless to fixate on it.
And I don’t need to fixate on it, because listening to Dolly Parton’s music reminded me of what is still my most treasured memory of my mother, one that only she could have given me. Lots of moms can cook, sew, and give smart advice about school and love, and generally act as a soft cushion for their kids to land on whenever they fall.
But none of them could have awakened and nourished the writer I became simply by loving the same things I loved, helping me understand them more deeply, and paying that love forward to others.
So Dolly did a good deed for me, too. She set me down the road to become who I am. And then, decades later, she helped me stop obsessing over what my mother didn’t give me and recognize the unique gifts she did bestow, simply by being herself.
Thanks for the coat, Mom. I wear it every day.
