“Jolene” (Divide and Kreate Remix)—Dolly Parton
I watched Morely Safer interview Dolly Parton on 60 minutes last night and I was pretty wowed out by her. Morely noted to the audience that she was as real as they come, and he ought to know since he’s been doing interviews on the show since before my parents even met. I knew she had a tuff life but I didn’t know she was dirt poor—one of 14 kids growing up in a shack in Tennessee without electricity or running water. I was shocked by a story she unabashedly told of being a little girl and so enamored by the pigs on the family farm that one day, her parents found her squeezed in between the pigletts, nuzzling on the mama pig’s teet!!!
She always knew she wanted to be a singer and left for Nashville on the day after her high school graduation. She created her attention-grabbing look based on the town tramp and wears her trademark ginormous bleached hair and heavy make-up to this day. She described herself in the interview as a cartoon character that she created. She said that she was three people—Dolly the business woman, Dolly Parton the singer and entertainer, and the Dolly that her family and friends knew.
I relate to her self-awareness about being a character. There’s a big difference, however, to being a character online and a character onstage. I was a clown in the chorus of Barnum during my freshman year of high school and thought it was all great fun until I stepped out in the bright lights and saw a black abyss in front of the stage where I’d expected to see the smiling, happily expectant faces of the audience… After that it was purely behind the scenes for me. I can strip things down to the bone for hundreds and thousands in my posts but I can’t imagine doing it LIVE with all of those people really THERE.
It’s one thing to fake it so real and flip the laptop lid shut and another to dive into a sea of people, half-naked but still in character…
There’s a thereness to the real world that hasn’t (yet) been duplicated. I am of the mindset that this is a good thing, as I don’t think the aim of technology should be to recreate the existing “real” world, but to invent new ways of being that are (loosely) based upon it.
P.S. I got this disco mix of Jolene off of a Tumblr mix by Sufjan Steven called “The Mix Will Rise Again” filled with tunes from and inspired by the past.
