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The journalist agreed: “If ever somebody figured out the American dream and made it work, it’s Dolly Parton.” That’s when she hit the talk-show circuit with a vengeance, responding to depressingly predictable jokes about her breasts by cracking better ones: she once quipped that when she burned her bra, it took the fire department three days to extinguish the flames. But those pop albums “got me where I wanted to be”. “People thought I had sold out,” she told Rolling Stone in 1980. In the heyday of feminist country songs by women who didn’t call themselves feminists – Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette, Jeannie C Riley – she sang, in 1968’s Just Because I’m a Woman, “My mistakes are no worse than yours/ Just because I’m a woman.” Although Parton herself has been married to Carl Dean since 1966, she expressed the pain of invisible women in a voice that rang pure and true. Subjects included suicide, miscarriage, alcoholism, drug addiction, homelessness, incarceration, murder, arson and potential incest. Starting with Hello, I’m Dolly in 1967, Parton’s first few albums specialised in what she calls “sad ass songs”: empathetic stories about horribly mistreated working-class women spiced with the bloody melodrama of the Appalachian folk ballads that had soundtracked her childhood. Songteller may surprise some casual fans with the bleakness of her early output. Right from the start, she was neutering criticism by owning it. There she wrote several hits for other artists while still in her teens, before scoring her first solo hit in 1966 with Dumb Blonde. She became a child star on local radio and TV, recording her first single at 13 and moving to Nashville the day after she graduated from high school. As a kid, she used to imagine that the chickens in the yard were her fans. Born in 1946, she grew up “dirt poor” in a one-room cabin on the banks of Tennessee’s Little Pigeon River with six brothers and five sisters. Parton’s origin story is the stuff of country songs, including some of her own, such as Coat of Many Colors and My Tennessee Mountain Home. No wonder her songwriting chops were eclipsed. Jokes about Parton’s chest, many of which she made herself, became such a trope in British culture that when scientists cloned a sheep from a mammary gland cell in 1996, they called it Dolly. One example of her pop-culture ubiquity is the 1981 Two Ronnies sketch in which Ronnie Barker donned a platinum-blonde wig and fake bosom to play “Polly Parton”. The other Dolly, the one I grew up with, was a jovial, self-deprecating talk-show regular and spoofable symbol of US excess.

“At the end of the day, I hope that I will be remembered as a good songwriter,” she writes in Songteller. In the early 1970s she was on such a roll that a single session in 1973 yielded both Jolene and I Will Always Love You. She has written, by her estimation, around 3000 songs, 175 of which are featured in a new book, Songteller: My Life in Lyrics. She can play around 20 instruments, including the fiddle, dulcimer, mandolin and pan-flute.

As a writer and performer, she sits at country music’s top table with Hank Williams and Johnny Cash. Parton’s fame used to have two distinct lanes. Festival-goers enjoyed the music but they loved the person even more. Her between-song patter, polished to a high shine, was the primary source of delight. Throw in the floor-filling 9 to 5 and the showstopping I Will Always Love You, and she still has just four undeniably famous songs in her vast catalogue: far fewer than Kylie Minogue, Barry Gibb or other artists to have played the Sunday afternoon legend slot in the past decade. I witnessed the Dolly effect first-hand at Glastonbury in 2014, when she drew one of the biggest crowds in the festival’s history, an achievement made all the more remarkable by the fact that only two of the songs she recorded – Jolene and the Kenny Rogers duet Islands in the Stream – have ever made the UK Top 40. The news inspired a joke (“It’s 9-to-5 per cent effective”), a fond YouTube parody (Vaccine, to the tune of Jolene), and yet another outpouring of love for a woman who inspires as much affection as any celebrity on Earth. Last month, it was revealed that Dolly Parton had donated $1m (£744,000) to Moderna’s successful effort to develop a vaccine for Covid-19.