October 31, 2000 | It would be so convenient if there were two Dolly Partons: the Top-40, "Two Doors Down" and "9 to 5" Dolly, the Dolly of the platinum-floss wigs and fake fingernails; and the Dolly of "Coat of Many Colors" and "Down From Dover," the guitar-picking Dolly with the mountains in her blood and the quivering teardrops in her voice.

That way, the hipster country fans who have no qualms about revering the likes of Hank Williams or Patsy Cline or Johnny Cash could ignore the "bad" Dolly and embrace the pure one, with no fear of ridicule from their peers. And the longtime, hardcore but perhaps less discriminating country fans those hipsters look down on -- the ones who might wear their hair a little too high or snap their gum a little too loud, the ones who at one time might have lovingly made quilts or collages for the likes of Randy Travis -- could have the other Dolly, the tacky one, the one who doesn't have a problem hopping into bed with a schmaltzy pop arrangement now and then. The purists would have their patron saint, the so-called rubes would have their good-time gal and everyone would be happy.

But there's only one Dolly Parton, and she's not divisible. You can pick and choose your favorite songs from the broad range of her music, but denying the pop Dolly Parton in favor of the homespun one only diminishes her mystery -- and denigrates her greatness. It would be handy if we could create our own versions of the artists we most adore -- take the "Sun Sessions"-era Elvis and skip the fat one, for example. But the artists we love best almost always confound us. As for Parton: She's a genuine rhinestone diamond.

- - - - - - - - - - - - Dolly Rebecca Parton was born in January 1946 in the Smoky Mountains of east Tennessee. Dolly's mother, Avie Lee Parton, married at 15 and had given birth to 12 children (one child, Larry, died as an infant) by the age of 35; Dolly was the fourth. Dolly's father, Robert, struggled to support the ever-growing family. In that sense, Dolly Parton's story is a textbook case of a young woman yearning for fame and riches as a way of escaping, and helping her family to escape, extreme poverty. Parton has been candid about her fondness for wigs, flashy clothes and all kinds of artifice: those trappings represent glamour and prosperity to her, and she's not completely wrong. As she notes in her highly entertaining (if sometimes maddeningly New-Agey) 1994 autobiography, "Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business," "It costs a lot to make a person look this cheap."

There are times when "My Life and Other Unfinished Business" almost reads like a parody of rags-to-riches biographies -- the part, for instance, where Parton recollects how she and her playmates would tie strings to June bugs and fly them around like toys. But Parton's childhood poverty informs much of her adult work, not so much because all of her songs are about being poor (most of them are not), but because she seems to be possessed of a certain brand of compassion that often comes from having to do without. Part of her sensibility, of course, comes from the type of music she grew up with: church music as well as ballads that had made their way across an ocean decades before she was born, songs about love and death and other mysteries, pieces of music that have been subtly changed over the years as they've been handed down.

Parton developed a love, and a knack, for songs that told stories: Songs that spoke of dutiful restraint between potential lovers ("Chas," off the superb and, unfortunately, out-of-print 1970 LP "The Fairest of Them All"), of man-stealing temptresses ("Jolene"), of women who are weary from making mistakes in love but always willing to try again ("The Bargain Store") and of forbidden love that lasts till the grave ("Silver Dagger"). Her songs, even many of the blatantly pop-country ones, are pure Appalachia in spirit, retooled for the late 20th century; they often have a haunting quality that's just a few quiet footsteps away from the ancient tales of girls dying on the moor with their babes in their arms or dead lovers who haunt the living.

As a girl, Parton had always loved singing, and with the help and encouragement of her uncle, Bill Owens, she landed a spot on a Knoxville, Tenn., television show at the age of 10. She made her first appearance at the Grand Ole Opry at 13. Immediately after graduating from high school, in 1964, she moved to Nashville, intent on becoming a country star; within her first few days there, she met her husband, Carl Dean, a shy fellow who to this day prefers to stay out of the spotlight that seems to hover almost perpetually over his wife.