Appreciation: Dolly Parton was introduced to America via television, where we saw her become a star

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Set us as preferred Like many country singers of her generation, Dolly Parton’s career began in local television, and TV has continued to be the place to get to know her.Her big-screen career, which exploded with “9 to 5,” settled to earth with “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas” and “Rhinestone” and recovered its dignity with “Steel Magnolias” (suggesting that she was at her best in a company of women), belonged for the most part to the 1980s.(“Straight Talk,” in 1992, is where it all ended.) But Parton, who died Tuesday at 80, had many more years on the small screen before, during and afterward, in variety shows (two of her own), specials, TV movies, guest shots, interviews and music videos, which is where much of America met Dolly — not just the singer, but the self-created package and the person, who were in some sense inextricable, a knowing combination of authenticity and artifice, performer and performance.

“The fact that I look totally artificial and the fact that I am totally real inside has made a nice little magical combination,” she told Atlanta TV journalist Monica Kaufman in 1987.Television is where we’ve seen her change, from a simple country singer and songwriter to a full-service pop star, through various body shapes, makeup regimes, unknowable cosmetic strategies, and ever more elaborate fashions, until she became a sort of spirit, essence of Dolly, the poor girl who dreamed of becoming exactly the star she became, mythic yet homespun, a force for good in a world that will miss her now that she’s gone.Music Dolly Parton, a national treasure whose country music career married grit and wit, faith and sex appeal, virtuosity and plastic surgery, has died.At the age of 10, she was appearing on the “Cas Walker Farm and Home Hour,” sponsored by a local grocery chain, out of Kno...