9 STORIES
1968 · 60S
Barely two minutes long, "The Bridge" is a teenage Dolly Parton's ballad about a pregnant girl abandoned by her lover, returning to the spot…
1970 · 70S
DOVER, TENNESSEE, USA
It sounds like a waiting-for-my-love ballad, but "Down From Dover" is a young unmarried woman's account of being cast out by her family, wor…
1973 · 70S
"Jolene" is not a cheating song or a catfight. It is a woman begging a rival not to take her man, and it is honest enough to admit she think…
1974 · 70S
The greatest love ballad of the twentieth century isn't about romance at all — Dolly Parton wrote it as a resignation letter to her boss, a …
1977 · 70S
It sounds like the happiest reunion in country-pop history, but it is really a song about relapse — a woman watching herself surrender, agai…
1977 · 70S
Tucked inside Dolly Parton's glossiest, most commercial pop album is a bleak Appalachian death ballad about an abandoned little girl and her…
1980 · 80S
Behind the bounciest wake-up song in pop history sits a protest song about office workers who get underpaid, overlooked and patronised, and …
1982 · 80S
LA GRANGE, TEXAS, USA
It sounds like a gentle holiday hymn, but "Hard Candy Christmas" is really a song about unemployed sex workers walking out of a shuttered Te…
2001 · 00S
It sounds like a 200-year-old mountain ballad carried over from Britain and Ireland, but Dolly Parton wrote it herself — a deliberate act of…