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Dolly Parton beat Hollywood critics to her own punchline.
Following the death of the country singer and actress at age 80, directors, collaborators, and media historians described how Parton turned self-deprecation, the practice of making yourself the butt of the joke before anyone else gets the chance, into a career-long strategy that carried her from Nashville session work in 1965 to a television presence that reached Miley Cyrus's generation.
How the persona got built Ray Stevens, a Country Music Hall of Famer and two-time Grammy winner known for novelty hits including "The Streak," produced some of Parton's earliest Nashville recordings in 1965, among them "Busy Signal" and "I've Known You All My Life." He told Fox News Digital that the 19 or 20-year-old Parton he met had not yet created the character the world later recognized.
She had grown up in Sevierville, Tennessee, already making the people around her laugh, and she brought that instinct into a Nashville scene where outrageous comedy was already tradition.
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