Dolly Parton always explained the magic trick she was doing

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Set us as preferred One way to understand Dolly Parton’s unique blend of talents — her wit, her savvy, her intelligence, her pluck — is to consider that she wrote one of music’s most enduring love songs about a crummy boss.The year was 1973, and Parton — who’d risen from a glamour-less childhood in Tennessee’s Great Smoky Mountains to something like celebrity as the so-called girl singer on Porter Wagoner’s popular TV show — had decided to leave Wagoner’s employ after seven years to strike out on her own.Wagoner hated the idea and eventually sued Parton for breach of contract; she wrote “I Will Always Love You” to try to get the older country star to see where she was coming from.With its yearning melody and its tender yet plainspoken language, the ballad speaks vividly of affection and loyalty — so vividly that, after Parton’s homey original topped Billboard’s country chart, Whitney Houston’s grand pop reimagining went to No.

1 on the Hot 100 in 1992 and stayed there for 14 weeks.Music Dolly Parton, a national treasure whose country music career married grit and wit, faith and sex appeal, virtuosity and plastic surgery, has died.Yet inside “Always” you can still hear traces of what amounted to a messy workplace dispute.

“Bittersweet memories, that’s all I am taking with me,” Parton sings in a voice trembling with determination.She adds: “Goodbye, please don’t cry — we both know that I’m not what you need.”Parton, who died Tuesday at age 80, made a career out of building illusions she delighted in dismantling.

As a precision-minded songwriter, she bestowed a kind of emotional dignity on everyday characters in hardscrabble circumstances; as a glittering pop persona, she called constant attention to the artifice of her own A-list stardom.Her signature maxim — “It costs a...