'Everything is a song to me.' Dolly Parton on faith, Miley Cyrus and Irish music
It was a night to celebrate the best of country music. The Late Late Show Country Music Christmas Special on RTÉ One on Friday night kicked off with Philomena Begley being the first person to be inducted into the ICMA Hall of Fame. There were appearances from Una Healy, Daniel O'Donnell, his sister Margo, Nathan Carter, Philomena Begley and Cliona Hagan.
Of course, the night belonged to Dolly Parton. "I look fake, but everything inside me," she told Ryan. "Well, I do believe that there is such a thing as really living something, feeling and knowing it."
On Irish music, Dolly said "A lot of people have the gift to write and be poetic, but there is something, I think it is why the Irish have always loved me and I have always loved them, we speak the same language. They appreciate and know what it is like to live hard and to be brought up poor and I think that they know when I am singing it, I mean it and I believe that they know that I feel that emotion that I have that is just built in my, I call it my Smokey Mountain DNA, but is from those old songs brought over from Ireland and England."
Speaking about a difficult personal time during the 1980s, Parton was exceptionally open. "I was going through a lot of stuff with family, a lot of decision making, with business partners, and people and things that were very important to me plus I was going through the change of life. With the hormones going crazy, I was gaining weight. It was a very, very depressing period of time."
Though her deep-seated faith ultimately pulled her through, Parton said that when you lose sight of God and of yourself, "you are going to fall on your fat butt, and that is what I did at the time."
This time in her life taught the superstar great empathy and understanding. "At that time I completely understood how people commit suicide, how people get on drugs and alcohol because when you are hurting so much that you can’t imagine how you could hurt anymore you think all kinds of stuff. But thank God I got out of that without any of that happening. But I do know how you can get there and how it feels to be there and how you have to just have to work as hard to get out of that as you can. To look for something bigger and brighter."
"I never try to tell anyone what to do," she told Ryan of her goddaughter, Miley Cyrus. "I am proud of Miley. She has been great since she was born and she is a really talented girl and I am going to predict that Miley is going to have another television show where she is going to be amazing, whether she is acting in it or singing in it or whatever. I just know she is great, we are just happy when we get together to do things. We talk girl stuff mostly, we don’t talk about the business unless it is something we need to." Proving herself to be the best godmother of all time, she lets Miley make her own way in life. "I don’t give her advice, she don’t ask me for advice. I always say anyway I have information, I don’t give advice. She’s going to do it her own way."
At the end of the interview, though no person in Ireland wanted it to finish, Ryan got to align his love of reading with Dolly's mission in life. Dolly Parton's Imagination Library is a free book gifting programme inspired by her love of literature and arrived to Irish shores in 2019, and will, she says, be one of her greatest legacies. "I thought I would just start a little programme for our county, maybe a couple of counties over. Now we are all over the world and we have given away since then 150 million books by the end of this year, hopefully."
