Dolly Parton has written thousands of songs during her decades-long career, finding inspiration in her own life and in others’ stories. She’s also gotten ideas in some unlikely places, including graveyards.
“In fact, my niece and I had a picnic in a graveyard three days ago,” she said in September, via The Boot. “I just love walking through them and looking at [the headstones]. I just love to imagine what people’s lives were like. They’re so well kept, and they’re peaceful.” She added, “It’s not the dead I’m afraid of — it’s the living!”
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The 74-year-old goes into further detail about her appreciation of graveyards in her new book, Songteller: My Life in Lyrics, sharing that she wrote her Porter Wagoner duet “Jeannie’s Afraid of the Dark” after seeing a child’s grave that included an eternal flame.
“I thought that was amazing,” she recalled. The lyrics of the song read, “But on Jeannie’s grave, we placed an eternal flame / That glows and never loses its spark.”
Parton was inspired to write Wagoner’s 1971 song “Out of the Silence (Came a Song)” when she was “sitting up on Graveyard Hill,” a cemetery near her home in East Tennessee. “I was thinking about all those people in their graves, wondering about their lives, of all the things that might have happened to them,” she wrote, later adding, “I’d create lives for all of those people in the graveyard, just invent stories in my head for them. A creative mind just likes to do that, I guess.”
“Even if I wasn’t writing about the people in the graveyard, I’ve written many songs just being in that peaceful environment,” she continued, “and read many a book.”
Songteller, which was released in November, contains the stories behind a number of Parton’s songs, as well as rare photos and memorabilia from the singer’s archives. “I write songs, but I tell stories in my songs,” Parton said on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert in October. “There’s just something about writing songs that’s kind of like my personal time with God.”
The Tennessee native added that writing is a way for her to work through her own feelings and help others express how they might be feeling. “I just feel like I can express myself in ways that I don’t need a doctor for, I don’t need therapy, I just sing it all out, write it all out,” she said. “I can write for other people too like you said. Because I see things happen to other people and I think, ‘They don’t know how to express how they feel.’ They’re depressed or they’re sad, so I write songs for them as well.”
