Dolly Parton: Still on the clock

 (To hear the audio version, click here)

Her publicist had sent a message indicating Parton would like to chat at 8:50. "A.M. or P.M.?" I responded. "A.M." was the reply.

Parton couldnt even wait that long: At 8:45, she was already on the line from New York, and she wasnt yawning through her coffee, either.

"I love to get up early and get my work done and get all my paperwork out of the way so I can enjoy the rest of the day," she said, with that trademark twinkle in her voice.

Obviously, its a plan thats worked for her. Since the mid- 1960s Parton has been a force to reckon with in the entertainment world, crossing over from country music to the pop charts, touring tirelessly throughout the decades, launching an amusement park thats about to celebrate its 25th anniversary, and building up a substantial resume of movie and television credits. She even found time to write the score for "9 to 5: The Musical," the stage adaptation of her wildly successful 1980 film with Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin. The "9 to 5" tour comes to the Wharton Center tonight.

So whos had time for sleeping in?

Horatio Alger never wrote a more incredible rags-to-riches tale than Partons life. Born in a cabin in rural Sevier County, Tenn., nearly 65 years ago, Dolly Rebecca Parton was the fourth of 12 children. Money was, as they say in Tennessee, as scarce as hens teeth.

"My father was a farmer," she said, "and so we lived kind of back there in the mountains, and I mostly just kind of did that until I graduated from high school. I wrote my songs and I used to sing on local radio and television shows back up in the mountains there in Knoxville."

In her 1994 autobiography "My Life and Other Unfinished Business," Parton recalls being unable to afford real cosmetics and instead gussying herself up with Mercurochrome lipstick and ersatz rouge made of berry juice.  "If theres one positive thing about being poor, its that it makes a person more creative," she writes.

The day after graduating from high school in June 1964, Parton grabbed her guitar, loaded her things into a cardboard suitcase and got on a bus to Nashville, determined to sell her songs. She had luck on her side.

"When I first moved to Nashville when I was 18, I got a job with a publishing company, writing songs," she said. "I started making $50 a week. That was my salary, so I never really had to work on a lot of other jobs."

Early on, she cut a few records targeted at the pop market: Tunes like "Dont Drop Out" and "Busy Signal" sound considerably more like Petula Clark than traditional Dolly Parton. But charming and catchy as the songs were, they did nothing to raise Partons profile, so she kept working.

Along the way, she even picked up a bit of secretarial experience — sort of.

"When I first moved to Nashville, I had a neighbor that owned an advertising outdoor sign company, so I answered his phone some, so I claimed that I was a secretary, but I wasnt really. It was just a favor and I didnt get paid for it, but I did it enough to kinda get a feel for what it might be like. But I was sittin at my desk writin songs, answerin the phone and writin songs — furthered my own career, not his."

Partons breakthrough year was 1967, which brought her a couple of hits on the country chart, "Something Fishy and "Dumb Blonde," in which she warned the world, "Just because Im blonde, dont think Im dumb, cuz this dumb blonde aint nobodys fool." A guest appearance on the popular "Porter Wagoner Show" led to a lucrative offer.

"The Porter Wagoner Show was the number one syndicated country show at that time in the nation," Parton recalled, "and, of course, that was my first big job when I first moved to Nashville. He replaced a girl singer (Norma Jean Beasler, known professionally as Pretty Miss Norma Jean) hed had for years — he had to because shed gotten married and moved away — so I got that job."

Wagoner, already a huge star, became a valuable mentor to Parton (he was the inspiration behind her signature song "I Will Always Love You," written shortly after she made the difficult decision to dissolve the partnership) and they had more than a dozen Top 10 successes on the country chart, including "Well Get Ahead Someday," "If Teardrops Were Pennies" and "Please Dont Stop Loving Me."

Behind the scenes, however, things werent always easy. In a 2008 interview with The Los Angeles Times, Parton admitted Wagoner was "a male chauvinist pig," adding "I dont mean this in a bad way."

"Thats why we fought like crazy," she told the Times, "because I wouldnt put up with a bunch of stuff. Out of respect for him, I knew he was the boss, and I would go along to where I felt this was reasonable for me. But once it passed points where it was like, Your way or my way, and this is just to control, to prove to you I can do it, then I would just pitch a damn fit. I wouldnt care if it killed me. I would just say what I thought."

After seven years, Parton split with Wagoner to concentrate on her solo career, which had taken off with "Joshua," "Jolene," "Coat of Many Colors" and "Touch Your Woman." The break-up sent shockwaves through the country world and led to tensions between Wagoner and Parton, which were resolved before Wagoners death in 2007.

Partons larger than life look and "countrypolitan" glamour got plenty of attention, but much of her music was serious and topical. Her songs often addressed topics that most country songwriters of the time wouldnt touch, sometimes in surprisingly frank ways.

"Daddy Come Get Me" is the plea of a woman locked up in a mental institution by a heartless husband. In "Down From Dover," a pregnant girl prays her lover will return soon, all too aware that soon "a tiny face will show itself, cuz waitings almost over."

"Evening Shade," a track from her 1970 album "My Blue Ridge Mountain Boy," paints a troubling picture of an orphanage run by a sadistic crone named Mrs. Bailey, who "believed in lots of work with little play" and doles out abuse on a regular basis. After one girl is beaten with a razor strap for the crime of having wet her bed, the other kids conspire to do away with the matron once and for all by locking her inside and torching the place.

"Evening Shade was burning, just like the hell it was," Parton sings in the songs chilling final line: The children not only get revenge, they apparently get away with it.

Parton also had risque wit. In "Traveling Man," she sings in the first person about being denied the love of her life by a mom who wont let her out of the house. But instead of parents just dont understand, this is a case of the daughter wising up too late. "That traveling man was a two-time lover," Parton laments. "He took my love — then he took my mother!"

In the late 1970s, Parton broadened her audience by incorporating pop, rock and even disco into her repertoire: Her 1978 single "Baby Im Burnin" managed to score on the country and the club music charts, while "Here You Come Again," "Two Doors Down" and "Heartbreaker" all broke into the pop Top 40. Parton even managed to take a ballad co-written by disco deity Donna Summer, "Starting Over Again," to the top of the country charts in 1980.

But Partons next major artistic collaborator would come from far outside the music world. Jane Fonda, who was about to produce and star in a comedy about beleaguered office workers called "9 to 5," contacted Parton, reportedly after seeing one of her album covers. According to a 1981 interview with People magazine, Fonda said she remembered thinking, "Boy, does she ever look like everybodys idea of a secretary."

Casting Parton was also a smart marketing strategy. "(Fondas) line was, to me, Oh, and Dolly will get us the South," Parton said, with laughter. "And I said, Well, the South, my butt! Ill get a few that aint in the South! Anyhow, I think she was just trying to get it to where we would be appealing to women from different places."

The screenplay of "9 to 5" had Fondas character, Judy Bernly, nearly drowning in the secretarial pool, alongside capable but stressed-out office manager Violet Newstead (Lily Tomlin) and executive assistant Doralee Rhodes (Parton), who gets considerable exercise from being frequently chased around her desk by her crass supervisor, Franklin Hart Jr. (Dabney Coleman). Thanks to a twist of fate, the trio are presented with an opportunity to take revenge on Hart.

It wasnt the first time Hollywood had knocked on Partons door. "I had been offered other movies before, but I hadnt really been that interested and Id never done any acting. But that one was such a great opportunity, I thought. Jane and Lily Tomlin were so hot at that time, and even Dabney Coleman (who played the brusque boss) was hot. And I thought, Well, how hard can this be? Ive got all this support. If its a hit, Ill take credit -- and if its a flop, Ill blame it on them. Nobody knows me!"

Parton had nothing to worry about. "9 to 5" was a runaway smash when it opened during the holiday season in 1980, grossing over $103 million (adjusted for inflation, that would be approximately $271 million). It also established Parton as a bankable box office name; immediately after "9 to 5" opened, Parton was signed to star opposite Burt Reynolds in "The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas."

Parton was grateful for Fondas support and repaid the kindness a few years later by leading the actress on a tour of Appalachia when Fonda was researching her role as a Kentucky woodcarver in the TV-movie "The Dollmaker."

Although "9 to 5" addressed the issues of sexual harassment and discrimination in the workplace with a humorous touch, Parton insists its messages did not go unnoticed:

"I really do think it did help a lot. I do think it brought a lot of attention to (the topic). Im still proud to be a part of it." It also raised Partons consciousness a bit. Fonda had extensively studied the concerns of women in the business world, but Parton admits she wasnt up to speed on the subject.

"At that time, I was just interested in being in a movie and hoping I did good," she said. "I didnt really understand or know what all the real cause was until later on, what we were really sayin and all that, that it was a political statement. Knowing now, after years have passed, how much good it really has done, I think it was great to bring awareness to it -- and any change at all is better than none. There are still more changes to be made, but I really do think that movie had a big impact to make people start thinking."

There would be many other films in Partons future, some of them terrific ("Steel Magnolias," in which she blends in perfectly with Shirley MacLaine, Sally Field, Olympia Dukakis and a young Julia Roberts), some of them dreadful ("Rhinestone," which gets off to a great start with her performance of "Tennessee Homesick Blues" and immediately goes into a tailspin as soon as co-star Sylvester Stallone makes his entrance) and some unjustly overlooked, like the sweet-natured 1992 mistaken-identity comedy "Straight Talk," in which she pretends to be a psychiatrist with a radio call-in show.

Still, when many people think of a Dolly Parton movie, its "9 to 5" that comes to mind, thanks in part to her memorable, million-selling theme song.

"Actually, that was part of my contract," Parton says of the tune. "I had told Jane, Im a singer-songwriter first of all, and I will be in this movie if I can write and sing the theme song." When it was time to record the final track, Parton brought in some back up. "I had all the girls (who worked on the movie), all the females — since it was all about the women — I had come down and sing on it, like a sing-along, so theyre all on the record. In addition, I used real singers, too, to get the harmonies. But we just had Jane and Lily and everybody singing on it, which was fun."

The song resurfaces to open and close the stage version of "9 to 5." The rest of the score was composed by Parton to fit the book by Patricia Resnick.

Parton said writing her first score for a musical was a challenge, although Resnick, director Joe Mantello and producer Bob Greenblatt made it an enjoyable learning experience.

"When they first brought it up to me, I knew these characters so well that I just wrote a whole bunch of songs in two weeks time and I sent em to them, and said, Well heres what my idea is … , and we started working from that," Parton said.

They liked all the stuff, but we certainly had to tailor-make stuff, cuz I dont know anything about the stage, how you have to have certain things for Act I and Act II and the timing and transitions. So thats what they were great with, with me. So all they had to do was tell me once, and I got it.""

While "9 to 5" did not take Broadway by storm — the script has been revised and slightly revamped for the touring production — the show earned Parton a Tony nomination for best original score and two Drama Desk nominations, one for outstanding music and another for outstanding lyrics.

"It shouldnt surprise anybody shes taken so well to the stage: Shes always been a storyteller first and foremost," commented New York Post critic Elizabeth Vincentelli. "Her countrified pop, enhanced by fiddle and pedal-steel guitar, fits perfectly on Broadway. Of all the mainstream artists whove tried their hand at show music in the past few years, she may be the most convincing."

Associated Press critic Michael Kuchwara agreed. "You wont mistake Partons words and music for the works of Stephen Sondheim, yet she has a simple, direct way with lyrics and a beguiling sense of melody whether its country twang, gospel, rhythm n blues, power ballad or sentimental love song."

Parton is also pleased with the results.

"It just seemed natural," she said. "When they asked me to do it, I said, I dont know if I can do it or not: Ive never been asked, never tried it, but Ill give it a whirl. And I actually realized I had a knack for it, cuz it was just right up my alley, that I could just write all this stuff, say what I wanted to say, create stories for all these characters that I knew so well, as I had memorized the script and knew everybody and had been in the movie and had watched it for 25 years, at that time. So it was easy and fun and I enjoyed gettin the chance to do that.”

9 to 5: The Musical

Wharton Center 7:30 p.m.

Wednesday, Dec. 15 and Thursday, Dec. 16; 8 p.m. Friday, Dec. 17; 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 18; 1 p.m. and 6:30 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 19,

$32.50-$67.50

(800) WHARTON

www.whartoncenter.com