Sing Muse ! Artful Weaving

 

Daniel Mendelsohn

Aristotle, for one, wasn’t all that impressed by Odysseus’s adventures. In the seventeenth chapter of his Poetics he observes, apropos of the relationship of a story’s “essential” meaning to its constituent episodes, that

the storyline of the Odyssey is not long. A man has been away from his homeland for many years, and Poseidon is always on the watch for him, and he is all alone. Meanwhile, the situation at home is such that his wealth is being consumed by the Suitors, who are plotting against his son. But after a storm-tossed journey he returns, and after revealing himself and attacking them is saved and destroys his enemies. That is the essential; everything else is episodes.

This summary will strike many as odd. Where, you wonder, are the famous adventures that most people think of as the meat of the great epic—the numerous escapades that showcase the ingenuity, wiliness, and derring-do of Homer’s hero during his decade-long return from the Trojan War? The Lotos-Eaters, who eat of a flower that erases memory? The seductive nymph Calypso, who holds him prisoner for seven years, offering to make him immortal if only he would stay with her—an offer he movingly refuses in favor of returning to his aging, mortal wife? His yearlong dalliance with the witchy Circe, who turns his men into swine? Or his lengthy sojourn among the effete Phaeacians, with their opulent wealth and glittering palaces, their taste for dancing and music—one of the many cultures that the epic presents as a tempting alternative to Ithaca—whose royal family the hero, deploying his famed rhetorical skills, wheedles into bringing him home?

Nor is there any mention here of the voyage to the Underworld, where, in one of the epic’s most moving moments, Odysseus attempts—and fails—to embrace the wispy ghost of his mother, of whose death, during his long absence, he had been unaware. And no mention either of the lengthiest of the adventures, the encounter with the one-eyed giant Cyclops, whom clever Odysseus—repeatedly celebrated by Homer as polymêtis (“greatly cunning”), polyphrôn (“having many kinds of intelligence”), polymêkhanos (“able to contrive many solutions”), and poikilomêtis (“of multifaceted wiles”)—vanquishes by means of an artful pun on the word “nobody,” the false name he gives the Cyclops when they first meet.

All this, in Aristotle’s summary, is reduced to “a storm-tossed journey.”

In part this is because he rightly emphasizes the importance of that other, far vaster part of the Odyssey, what he calls “the situation at home”—the crisis that the hero’s long absence has created for his city, whose political institutions are collapsing; for his wife, Penelope, who is besieged by the Suitors; and for his young son, Telemachus, who strives to live up to the grand reputation of the father he never knew. These constitute what screenwriting courses refer to as the “stakes”—the crisis that must be resolved by the hero’s eventual return; otherwise the homecoming has no point. Only four of the epic’s twenty-four books are devoted to the adventures, which are narrated by the notoriously smooth-talking hero himself before the mesmerized Phaeacian court: his greatest feat of verbal artistry.

But the main reason Aristotle gives short shrift to the adventures has to do with the epic’s structure. In the section of the Poetics devoted to the Odyssey, he’s primarily interested in the workings of plot. The Odyssey’s plot is one that he admires as being “complex” (the many ups and downs of its characters, the multiple scenes of recognition with which the poem concludes) and commends because of its “double thread”: the ascending arc of its hero’s rehabilitation and eventual triumph, twined around the descending arc of his enemies’ downfall.

While satisfying to Aristotle, the very complexity of the Odyssey’s narrative, constantly moving as it does between past and present, reminiscence and action, Ithaca and those far-flung voyages, is no doubt what has made it so difficult to bring successfully to the cinematic screen—this despite the fact that the adventures in particular seem to cry out for big-screen, special-effects treatment. The problem isn’t merely the vast amount of incident that needs to be covered. Homer also has a distinctive way of embedding his elaborate narratives within other narratives. Stories nest within stories; lengthy conversations are reported within other lengthy conversations. The most famous instance of this technique occurs in book 19, when an elderly housemaid who is bathing the feet of the disguised Odysseus recognizes a telltale scar that the hero had incurred during a boar hunt in his youth. At the moment she realizes that the “beggar” before her is her long-lost master, the narrative grinds to a halt in order to loop back through not one but two embedded flashbacks, first to the boar hunt and then to the day of the hero’s birth, before circling back to the present.

How to represent any of this—the structure and the technique as well as the vast tale itself—in the course of two or three hours?

One answer is that you can’t. It is no accident that the most scrupulously faithful dramatic adaptation of the Odyssey has been not a film but a miniseries: the meticulously detailed eight-part L’Odissea (1968), a French-Italian coproduction directed by Franco Rossi. The miniseries, a form that is itself episodic, solves the problem of how to weave many episodes into a larger pattern that is never extraneous to the “essential” theme of the story—Odysseus’s homecoming, its nature, origins, and ramifications—as Aristotle recommends. The great length permitted by the genre allowed the writers of the series to evoke even the most minor characters and incidents.¹

But a movie—even a very long movie—inevitably has a much harder time twining the threads, organizing the episodes in a way that does not (and this is the trick) feel “episodic.” It says something that of the very few movie adaptations of the Odyssey that have appeared, two—Ulysses (1954), an antic and amusing Italian production starring a swashbuckling Kirk Douglas and Silvana Mangano as the royal couple and Anthony Quinn as Antinoüs, the loathsome leader of the Suitors, and, more recently, The Return (2024), with Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche—make deep cuts. The former eliminates most of the adventures (presented as flashbacks while Odysseus gazes out to sea during his stay with the Phaeacians) while compressing the situation at home to a bare minimum.

The Return, on the other hand, cuts out the entire first half of the epic and starts with the hero’s return home. This naturally eliminates not only the supernatural elements—the gods, the nymphs, the monsters, the divine dalliances, and the spooky encounters—but everything in Homer that establishes the stakes. Informed, perhaps, by recent approaches to the Homeric poems as proto–case studies in PTSD,² the film recasts what Aristotle saw as the hero’s triumphant arc as the grim tale of a traumatized veteran. (At one point Odysseus himself openly sneers at the idea of “heroes” when someone asks about the war.) The Ithaca to which this Odysseus, played by a wiry, scowling Fiennes, comes home reflects his depressed state: a scattering of dun-colored huts inhabited by meanly clothed peasants, its palace a dreary pile of stones. You wondered why he was so eager to get back.

To do all of the Odyssey justice—justice, that is, to its structure as well as its content—it would seem that you need a director who is not only capable of producing a visually engrossing spectacle but also adept at handling complexly embedded narratives. Which is why, soon after the release of The Return, some people, myself included, were elated when it was announced that the British American director Christopher Nolan was working on a movie adaptation of the epic.

Nolan, after all, made his name by twisting narrative threads in ways you wouldn’t be wrong in describing as polymêtis. His first feature, Following (1998), tracks an aimless young Londoner who likes to follow random people around—harmlessly at first—until one of them turns out to be a sly cat burglar who ensnares his stalker in a dense and finally deadly web of lies and illusions. Memento (2000), which won him widespread acclaim, highlighted what was to become another entrenched theme of the filmmaker’s work: the relationship between memory and guilt. An amnesiac (Guy Pearce) bent on finding and killing his wife’s murderer must rely on an elaborate system of photographs and notes, some tattooed on his own body, as a means of retaining consciousness of who people are, where he has been, and what he has accomplished in his quest for clues. Here, too, it turns out that the protagonist has been the victim of an ingeniously plotted scam.

What was so intriguing about Memento was the technique Nolan employed to suggest Leonard’s fragmented mental reality and to recreate it in the audience. The film has two narrative threads: a black-and-white sequence that follows events in chronological order and a color sequence that moves backward in time. As each proceeds, the audience comes ever closer to being able to put the pieces together in a way that Leonard can’t. Such toying with chronology has become a hallmark of Nolan’s work, not least in a marvelous venture into sci-fi, Interstellar (2014), an astronauts-saving-the-inhabitants-of-a-dying-Earth extravaganza in which time, literally bent out of shape (there’s a black hole), moves at different rates for various of its characters, with sometimes very moving results. I doubt that I was the only one in the theater getting teary-eyed during the scene at the end between the still-young protagonist (Matthew McConaughey) and his now elderly daughter.

Guilty characters with dark pasts resurfaced in other Nolan films, most notably the Dark Knight trilogy, the opening chapter of which, Batman Begins (2005), depicts Bruce Wayne/Batman (Christian Bale) as a man who, because of his failure, as a boy, to prevent the murder of his father and mother, feels no less “guilty” in some ways than are the outlandish villains he constantly battles. Nolan’s psychologically somber Batman films were ecstatically received as a shrewdly contemporary reimagining of the old franchise and had huge international success, but to my mind they lacked—perhaps of necessity, given their pop nature—the stimulating structural ingenuity of some of his other films. In The Prestige (2006), an obsessive and ultimately murderous rivalry between two turn-of-the-century London magicians—one of whom has caused the death of the other’s wife—results in deliciously inventive plots-within-plots that allow the director to play at length with favorite themes of guilt and innocence, illusion and reality, human action and its sometimes unforeseen consequences.

And in the Oscar-winning Oppenheimer (2023), another guilt-ridden hero (Cillian Murphy, playing the morally tormented leader of the Manhattan Project) is caught in knotty webs of both his own and others’ making. Here Nolan topped Aristotle by having not two but three discrete plot threads twining around one another: one follows Oppenheimer’s participation in the development of the atom bomb; the second looks forward to the Star Chamber–like 1954 government investigation of Oppenheimer, whose security clearance has been threatened by his early ties to the Communist Party; and the third, set in 1959, focuses on Senate hearings on Lewis Strauss’s nomination as commerce secretary and his involvement in revoking Oppenheimer’s clearance back in 1954.

Nolan’s penchant for convolution can lead him astray. I’ve never quite been able to figure out precisely what’s going on in Inception (2010), a stylish fantasy in which futuristic criminal “extractors” wreak high-tech havoc on their marks by stealing their inmost thoughts from—or implanting new thoughts in—their subconscious, a feat they manage to achieve by entering their victims’ dreams. (Or something.) Still, the rendering of the dreams was so visually arresting that I’m not sure I cared. And the director’s virtually nonverbal World War II epic Dunkirk (2017) left you understanding nothing about that historical disaster, but it was gratifyingly eye- (and ear-) popping.

Whatever its flaws, Nolan’s work indicated that he might indeed be the right person to take on Odysseus, another multifaceted hero characterized at once by admirable cleverness and dark behaviors, and the Odyssey, a text characterized by temporal disjuncts and narrative playfulness. The result, a $250 million, three-hour-long behemoth, the first movie to be shot entirely in the IMAX format, is, like Batman Begins, a darkly psychologizing updating of a classic; like Memento, it toys with themes of memory and forgetting while, like Oppenheimer, it twists a profusion of narrative and temporal arcs. And like the sack of unruly winds that Aeolus, the divine custodian of the winds, entrusts to Odysseus in book 10—only to have it opened by the hero’s suspicious crewmen, with disastrous results—it is in the end a mixed bag: at once a vehicle for the director’s virtues and, as with The Return, a case study of the weaknesses inherent in attempting to modernize a work many of whose values remain, for all its timelessness, stubbornly archaic.

It’s not that Nolan isn’t aware of the values of the original. In an interview that appeared in The New York Times a month before the movie’s release, he spoke about his early, formative love for the Odyssey, which he first encountered as a stage production he saw as a young schoolboy in London. What marked him particularly, he recalled, were the image of the Trojan Horse—the clever invention of Odysseus that allowed the Greeks to infiltrate Troy, which is mentioned several times in Homer’s text and is the subject of a song sung by the Phaeacians’ court bard—and the episode of the Sirens and their song.³

Small wonder, then, that the film, in all its IMAX glory, is often visually impressive and, even more interestingly, that from its opening to its closing scene it finds ways to remind us that epic was considered to be a form of “song” and hence was something its original audience experienced aurally rather than visually. It’s a nice touch that Nolan’s film begins with Phemius, the court bard in Odysseus’s palace, rapping rhythmically on the floor with his stick as he intones words with well-known connections to the tales of Troy—“a face [i.e., Helen’s], a man, a song”—and, even more, that Phemius is played by the rapper Travis Scott: the director’s sly nod to the oral, improvisational origins of Archaic epic.

As you’d expect, Nolan’s own “song” effectively replicates the imbricated textures of the original. Because of the nature of epic narration, with its vast arcs, many famous “reveals” necessarily stand cheek by jowl with the backstories that set them up. When, in book 17, Odysseus approaches the gate of his palace for the first time in twenty years and spots his faithful old hunting dog, Argos, now flea-bitten and lying atop the town dung heap—a powerful analogue for the haggard warrior himself—the poet pauses to give you the story of how Odysseus acquired and trained Argos as a puppy, what good a tracker he was, and so forth. Similarly, there’s a climactic moment at the end of book 21 when Odysseus finally reveals his true identity by wielding a magnificent bow that he alone is strong enough to string—he plucks its twanging string, Homer tells us meaningfully, just the way a professional bard does with his lyre—and by shooting an arrow through twelve ax heads that have been lined up: a trick, the poet has recently told us, that he used to perform in the bygone days.

Nolan inserts space between the backstories and the reveals in a way that’s appropriate to a dramatization and finds ways to give the tension between past and present interesting visual textures. Early on, an image of the now decrepit Argos, abused by the arrogant Suitors (led by Robert Pattinson’s sneering Antinoüs, in a faded-pretty-boy turn), melts into a flashback of the young hero meeting his frisky puppy; a bit later we’re watching a younger Odysseus (a heavily bearded Matt Damon) performing his arrows-through-the-axes trick as Penelope, smiling indulgently, looks on. And Nolan has found ways to slip the twanging of the bowstring early enough into his movie that when the returned hero plucks the bowstring at the end—the prelude to the climactic slaughter of the Suitors—the moment has just the right shivery power. Since Nolan started dropping trailers, the Internet has been aflame with discussions of the “accuracy” of the costumes, ships, armor, and diction of the movie, but the most authentic thing about this Odyssey may well be its densely braided narrative textures, which succeed in replicating Homer’s artful weaving.

Weaving, as it happens, is crucial in the Odyssey. Even people who have never read the epic are likely to have heard the story, recalled by an irritated Suitor in book 2, of how “sharp-witted” Penelope, every inch as ingenious as her husband, had held off the Suitors for three years by promising that she’d marry one of them when she finished weaving a funeral shroud for her father-in-law, Laërtes—and then, by night, unweaving what she’d woven by day. Nolan places this scene in the “now” of the homecoming story: Penelope (Anne Hathaway, in a portrayal that wavers nicely between sharp authority and anguish) explains her weaving process to Telemachus and then, gesturing to the palace and the city beyond, as if her civilization itself were a giant artwork, makes an observation about the relationship between form and content of which Aristotle himself, you suspect, would approve: “The structure is nothing without the people’s respect for its meaning.” Like the sly self-reflexive depictions of bardic artistry in the Odyssey, the queen’s remark seems like a comment on the way Nolan’s elaborately textured structures are meant to serve his long-standing themes.

While Aristotle gives the adventures short shrift, Nolan certainly doesn’t; the movie has great visual panache. In the Underworld scene, the hands of the dead, whom Odysseus has been instructed to summon by means of a creepily bloody ritual, wriggle upward, unnervingly, from beneath the black sand of the shore. The storms at sea—scenes to which Homer devotes some of his most memorably descriptive poetry—are impressively scary. And Nolan’s rendering of the Cyclops episode is unlikely to be topped, the huge IMAX screen powerfully conveying the inky immensity of the giant’s lair as the Greek warriors, puny in comparison with their tormentor, anxiously wander through it. (All this is helped by some very effective sound design: the entire theater shakes when Polyphemus makes his entrance.) In this version, it’s not just the Cyclops’s (Bill Irwin’s) vision that’s wonky: some of his features have been violently twisted ninety degrees, so the famous “one sole eye” sits vertically in his forehead, blinking side to side.

Polyphemus isn’t the only character who gets a makeover. In Homer, Circe decorously taps Odysseus’s men with a magic wand to transform them into swine; Nolan gives the scene a repellent physicality, as the witch (a decidedly unglamorous middle-aged Wiccan type, played with earthy relish by Samantha Morton) violently uses her hands to massage their faces into snouts after they pig out on the stew she’s served them. In one of a few feminism-inflected moments, Circe bitterly suggests that the transformation reveals rather than conceals who these men really are: “They raped and pillaged across the world for you! Filthy soldiers with empty bellies and hot blood. Look at them and know your own men!”

It has to be said that whatever Nolan’s taste for optical extravagance, the production design here is disappointingly unimaginative: the drearily sepia-toned sets and costumes, sooty in the flickering torchlight, look like they’ve been rented from the Game of Thrones warehouse. In Homer, the palace of Odysseus’s old comrade Menelaos is so opulent that Telemachus, who’s come to interview the indulgent, rather sentimental Spartan king about his father’s whereabouts, openly gawks: “Look at the bronze that flashes throughout the echoing palace,/At the gleam of gold and amber—Look! Silver and ivory, too!” Here Menelaos is a thuggish warlord who, it would seem, has enjoyed beating his wife, Helen—the Kenyan Mexican actress Lupita Nyong’o, in a bit of casting that launched a thousand tweets—half of whose legendarily beautiful face is covered with deep scars. This Menelaos (Jon Bernthal, sounding vaguely Tony Soprano–ish) guffaws that perhaps that famous face would now launch only five hundred ships.

If the film has a single unifying visual motif, it is, unsurprisingly, the Trojan Horse, which made such an impression on the young Nolan. When we first see it, in an opening flashback to the end of the war, the huge black contraption is sticking out of the sand by the seashore, left there to be discovered by a group of gullible Trojan warriors. Odysseus has also left a young Greek soldier named Sinon (Elliot Page) to ensnare the enemy by claiming that it is a gift from the (allegedly) retreating Greeks. The Trojans seize the Horse and kill the naive youth, whom Odysseus had kept in the dark about the Greeks’ master plan. In Nolan’s Odyssey, the only significant encounter the hero has in the Underworld is with the ghost of Sinon, who reproaches his commander for his duplicity—the negative side of his great cunning. The final image of the film reiterates the point: the Horse’s unseeing eye, recalling that of the Cyclops, staring out from the smoking rubble of Troy—the deadly aftermath of yet another of Odysseus’s clever schemes.

But then, the only side of Odysseus—and indeed of the Odyssey—that you get in Nolan’s film is the negative one. “I wanted the film to be accessible,” he has said.

I wanted the world of The Odyssey to feel like a world that a modern audience could relate to. We didn’t want it to look or sound like previous movies set during antiquity, as many of them take their cues from certain periods of art and music, like Neoclassical painting from 18th and 19th century Europe or Romantic Era orchestral compositions. We wanted an earthy, modern, relatable tone to ground the story.

As with The Return, “earthy, modern, relatable” here translates to a focus on psychological angst and a grim “realism” that shrewdly channels a contemporary impatience with notions such as “great men” and “heroism.” In this Odyssey, there is no cleverness, no humor, no wily charm. In this Odyssey, the hero doesn’t trick the Cyclops with his brilliant “nobody” pun; he and his men just poke the giant’s eye out and make a gridiron-inspired run for it. (“Run low through the entrance and then split wide!”) This Odysseus has no sparkling repartee with his divine patroness, Athena—a delightful leitmotif of Homer’s text—because the crucial part in the epic played by that awesome goddess, with her creepy “owl-eyes,” has been whittled down to a couple of scenes in which Athena (Zendaya, swathed in what looks like Jil Sander) bucks him up during his moments of religious doubt. “Look! Who’s moving those clouds? Who’s moving that water?!” The dialogue, alas, is pedestrian throughout.

Nor can this Odysseus charm the Phaeacians with his seductive talk and beguiling storytelling, because Nolan has eliminated the Phaeacian episode altogether—a real loss, given that long episode’s enchanting portrayal of the feisty teenage princess Nausicaa, who discovers the shipwrecked hero and saves him, and of her adoring parents. This Odysseus does not break down in tears at the apparition of his mother in Hades, because that tender moment, too, has been excised, along with the most crucial encounter he has in the Underworld. The ghost of Achilles, who had given up long life in return for eternal glory, tells his old comrade that he would rather be alive, the lowest servant of a poor man, than king of all the dead: a ringing endorsement of the Odyssey’s hero, who stops at nothing to survive.

Nolan deletes all this while retaining material that adds little to his story or its themes. A confusingly extended scene of a battle with a race of cannibalistic giants called the Laestrygonians, a relatively uninteresting episode in book 10, adds nothing, except perhaps an adrenaline rush for the eighteen-to-twenty-six crowd.

Worse, this Odysseus does not make his moving rejection of Calypso’s offer of immortality because Nolan, taking a leaf from the Kirk Douglas version, portrays Odysseus as being an amnesiac during the seven years he spends with her; he doesn’t even know he has a wife to return to. In a conflation of two canonical adventures, Nolan has his Calypso (Charlize Theron)—here apparently not a goddess but an ordinary mortal—confess to her lover that for all those seven years she’s been feeding him Lotos in order to ease his mental anguish. “You want to remember, but what if remembering destroys your happiness?” she murmurs—one of several Yoda-like utterances that Nolan attributes to a character who, in the original, is the mistress of an impressive rhetorical style. (Homer’s Calypso, faced with Zeus’s order to give up her captive, rages against the male double standard for female sexual behavior in a memorable speech that has lost none of its freshness—or pertinence.) The whole point of the Calypso episode is that Odysseus remembers the wife, and the life, he has left behind: when we first meet him, in book 5, he is staring out to sea, “sitting there; nor did his tears/Ever dry, since the sweetness of life was trickling away/As he grieved for his homecoming.”

What this Odysseus does remember is the Horse and everything that Nolan wants it to represent. The climax of his adaptation is not the triumphant achievement of the long-deferred vengeance and restitution of the hero’s identity but a moment the evening before, when Odysseus, disguised as a beggar, converses with Penelope. Losing hope, she insists that the husband she remembers would have found a way to come home if he were still alive. Rueful, Odysseus replies, “It’s not always an easy thing, a homecoming. What if the Odysseus you knew lost his way? What if he saw things?… What if, when he opened the gates of Troy, he saw ten years of rage pour into that city in one night?” This triggers an extended flashback to the atrocities committed by the Greeks during the fall of the city: the rapes, the beheadings, the desecrations of shrines. For these crimes, Nolan’s Odysseus feels a crippling guilt:

We left them a gift, an offering of peace that they took into their home. We violated all that is held sacred between people and turned a fight into a hunt. To burn the walls of Troy was to burn the world entire…. What if [Odysseus] knew, that very night, as he walked through fires of anarchy and pain and in the days of sweaty celebrations that followed…what if he knew exactly what he’d done?

As this resounding speech echoed in my ears, it occurred to me that it sounds nothing like the heroes of Homer—who, after all, gleefully vaunt over the mutilated bodies of their slaughtered enemies—but a lot like the heroes of Christopher Nolan movies. This tormented, guilt-ridden Odysseus, stripped of humor and wit, seductiveness and cleverness, is a sibling of Memento’s anguished amnesiac, of Batman, of Oppenheimer, men tormented by pasts they wrestle with in different ways. Speaking to the Times on the eve of his movie’s release, Nolan acknowledged how, as he read various translations of the Odyssey, he realized that it was the “ur-text. It’s in everything I’ve done before.”

But whatever his lifelong fascination with the epic, Nolan has merely remade Homer’s hero in his own image, just as he has imposed on Odysseus’s adventures values utterly foreign to Homer. Is his new vehicle for Odysseus’s tale impressive in its visual impact and distinctive in its structural ingenuity? Yes. But is its “essential” in any way Homeric? On that I’ll let Penelope have the last word: “The structure is nothing without the people’s respect for its meaning.”

NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

 

 

Dolly Parton, Superstar Whose Songs Spoke to Millions, Dies at 80

 

 

 

Known for her outsize persona, appearance and talent, she rose from rural poverty to become a top-selling singer, songwriter and entrepreneur.

 By Bill Friskics-Warren

 Dolly Parton, a rags-to-rhinestones daughter of Appalachia who for six decades ruled country music and beyond with an outsize personality and down-home wit that enshrined her as one of America’s most cherished originals, died on Tuesday in Nashville. She was 80.

Her death was announced by her family. A spokesman said that she died after a brief battle with cancer and that she had been admitted to the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center in Nashville on Friday. Concerns about Ms. Parton’s health arose last year when she postponed a Las Vegas residency, and intensified to the point that she took to social media in October to announce, “I ain’t dead yet.” This May, she canceled the residency but said that she had responded well to treatment after her immune and digestive systems had, as she put it, “got all out of whack” in recent years.

From her hardscrabble beginnings to glittering stardom, Ms. Parton’s life was the stuff of make-believe. With her voluptuous figure, sparkly stage costumes and blond bouffant wigs, she was likened by the writer Chet Flippo to the Big Rock Candy Mountain, the Depression-era symbol of abundance. Her songs spoke to millions, confronting privation and loss even as they radiated possibility and hope.

She was, quintessentially, a uniter of people. In 2019, The New York Times ran a story with the headline “Is There Anything We Can All Agree On? Yes: Dolly Parton.”

Ms. Parton cannily exploited — and transcended — rural stereotypes and kitsch to fashion a folksy chic entirely her own. (“A country girl’s idea of glam,” she called it in the song “Backwoods Barbie.”) In the process, she became an international celebrity who headlined stadium tours, starred in Hollywood movies, built a business empire and appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone. Her at times girlish soprano notwithstanding, she was anything but the “dumb blonde” invoked in the title of her 1966 single.

“I’ve created this and played it up — the makeup, the whole persona,” Ms. Parton said, alluding to her plastic surgeries as well as her colloquial “Dollyisms” in a 2002 interview with The Times.

“But this isn’t all I am,” she added. “It’s not even most of what I am. Hopefully people can see beneath the hair to know there’s a brain, beneath the boobs to know there’s a heart and behind all the other stuff to know there’s some talent.”

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Ms. Parton with Porter Wagoner. Her early breakthrough came in 1967 when she was hired to appear on his syndicated country music television variety program.Credit...Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

Inducted into both the country music and rock ’n’ roll halls of fame, Ms. Parton was the top-ranking female singer on country radio from 1967 to 1993, and had a total of 25 No. 1 country singles.

Her early breakthrough came in 1967 when she was hired as the “girl singer” on “The Porter Wagoner Show,” a syndicated country music television variety program. Several years later, she had No. 1 country hits with records like “Jolene” and “I Will Always Love You.”

Both songs were among about 3,000 titles she published in her lifetime, hundreds of which have been recorded by other artists, including Tina Turner, Norah Jones, the White Stripes, Merle Haggard, RuPaul and Whitney Houston.

Featured in the 1992 movie “The Bodyguard,” Ms. Houston’s version of “I Will Always Love You” spent 14 weeks at the top of the pop chart. The song had previously been a No. 1 country single twice, in versions released by Ms. Parton in 1974 and 1982.

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Ms. Parton, center, with Linda Ronstadt, left, and Emmylou Harris around the time of the release of their first album together, “Trio,” in 1987.Credit...Lennox Mcclendon/Associated Press

With Loretta Lynn and Tammy Wynette, Ms. Parton blazed a trail for women in country music, inspiring contemporaries like Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris, as well as latter-day hitmakers like Carrie Underwood, Kacey Musgraves and Taylor Swift. She recorded a pair of albums, “Trio” and “Trio II,” with Ms. Ronstadt and Ms. Harris.

“I can’t imagine anybody, especially in country, who doesn’t try to emulate Dolly in some way,” Ms. Harris said on the occasion of Ms. Parton’s Kennedy Center Honors award in 2006.

Ms. Parton was one of country music’s greatest ambassadors, but she also collaborated widely with artists outside traditional Nashville circles, including Mavis Staples, Queen Latifah, Julio Iglesias and Ladysmith Black Mambazo. “Islands in the Stream,” a triple platinum-selling duet Ms. Parton recorded with Kenny Rogers, topped both the country and pop charts in 1983. (The song was written by Barry, Maurice and Robin Gibb of the Bee Gees.)

Stylistically, Ms. Parton’s music ran the gamut: mountain bluegrass and soul-inflected countrypolitan, disco-era pop and covers of classic rock touchstones written by Neil Young and Led Zeppelin — all of it rendered indelible by her irrepressible spirit and alternately keening and gossamer soprano drawl.

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Ms. Parton and Kenny Rogers rehearsing in 1983, the year their duet “Islands in the Stream” topped both the country and pop charts.Credit...Doug Pizac/Associated Press

She wrote unabashedly, in simple Southern vernacular, about growing up as the daughter of an illiterate sharecropper.

“I’ve seen Daddy’s hands break open and bleed / And I’ve seen him work ’til he’s stiff as a board,” she sang over wistful harmonica and acoustic guitar in “In the Good Old Days (When Times Were Bad).” “I’ve seen Mama layin’ in sufferin’ and sickness / In need of a doctor we couldn’t afford. / Anything at all was more than we had / In the good old days when times were bad.”

In “Coat of Many Colors,” maybe her most beloved original, Ms. Parton plumbed childhood feelings of pride and humiliation. In this case, the coat in question — quilted from rags and originally a source of delight and the expression of a mother’s love — becomes an object of ridicule when Dolly’s classmates poke fun at her for wearing it to school:

So with patches on my britches

And holes in both my shoes,

In my coat of many colors

I hurried off to school

Just to find the others laughing

And making fun of me

In my coat of many colors

My Mama made for me

“That little song is like a world of things,” Ms. Parton said of “Coat of Many Colors” in “Dolly Parton, Songteller: My Life in Lyrics” (2020), written with Robert K. Oermann. “It teaches about bullying, about love, about acceptance, about good parents. That little story has even been written into a schoolbook to teach children about being different.”

Empathy was a hallmark of Ms. Parton’s songwriting, perhaps nowhere so much as in “Down From Dover” and “Daddy Come Get Me,” harrowing Southern gothic ballads about teen pregnancy and how patriarchy blames and victimizes young women.

Assertive women populated Ms. Parton’s songs, whether through her proto-feminist rewrite of Jimmie Rodgers’s “Mule Skinner Blues (Blue Yodel No. 8)” or by advocating parity in the bedroom (“Touch Your Woman”) and in the workplace (“9 to 5”).

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From left, Lily Tomlin, Ms. Parton and Jane Fonda in the 1980 film “9 to 5,” about working women drudging for a sexist boss.Credit...20th Century Fox

“It’s a rich man’s game / No matter what they call it / And you spend your life / Putting money in his wallet,” Ms. Parton sang, with a mixture of fury and resolve, in the 1980 pink-collar comedy “9 to 5.” Besides writing and performing the movie’s theme song, a No. 1 pop and country hit, she also starred in the film as a beleaguered secretary drudging for a sexist boss, alongside Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin.

Ms. Parton would go on to star in other films, among them “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas” (1982), with Burt Reynolds; “Steel Magnolias” (1989), with Julia Roberts and Shirley MacLaine; and “Straight Talk” (1992), with James Woods.

In 1976, she became the first woman in country music to host her own syndicated TV series; a decade later, she had an hourlong variety show on ABC. But for all her reach and command as an entertainer — including her ubiquitous appearances on TV talk shows and specials — Ms. Parton viewed herself, first and foremost, as a songwriter.

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Norah Jones, at piano, was one of many artists from outside country music who collaborated with Ms. Parton.Credit...Scott Gries/Getty Images

“Writing’s just as natural to me as getting up and cooking breakfast,” she told The Times in 2002. “I ain’t never far away from a pencil and paper or a tape recorder. I write every day, even when I’m on a plane, in the tub or on the bus. It burns in me.”

She continued: “Songwriting is my way of channeling my feelings and my thoughts. Not just mine, but the things I see, the people I care about. My head would explode if I didn’t get some of that stuff out. Not everything I write is good, but it’s all good for me — like therapy.”

Dolly Rebecca Parton was born on Jan. 19, 1946, the fourth of 12 children of Robert Lee and Avie Lee (Owens) Parton, in a one-room cabin on the banks of the Little Pigeon River in Sevier County, Tenn. Her father was a tenant farmer, and her mother was a homemaker who sang old Anglo-Celtic ballads and hymns while doing housework.

The Partons were so poor that Dolly’s father had to pay the doctor who attended her birth with a sack of cornmeal. Ms. Parton may have grown up without plumbing, heat, electricity and other modern conveniences, but she always insisted that she also grew up happy, and that music offered her a refuge from want.

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Ms. Parton’s 2024 album “Smoky Mountain DNA: Family, Faith and Fables” was produced by her cousin Richie Owens and featured collaborations with members of her extended family.Credit...Owepar Records, via Associated Press

“Most of us in the household learned to play early on,” she said in “Dolly Parton, Songteller.” “Every time anybody showed up, any uncle or aunt who knew how to play an instrument, I’d have them show me how to play a little bit on the banjo, the guitar, the autoharp or whatever instrument was around.”

When she was 5 or so, she wrote her first song, a ditty about a corncob doll with corn-silk hair called “Little Tiny Tasseltop.” She started singing on radio and on TV at 10, on the “Cas Walker Farm and Home Hour” in Knoxville, securing bookings with the help of her uncle Bill Owens, who also bought her her first guitar. The two would go on to write many songs together.

Ms. Parton made her recording debut in 1959, the same year she made her first appearance at the Grand Ole Opry. In 1962, she signed a songwriting deal with Tree International Publishing (now part of Sony Music Publishing). Two years later, she became the first person in her family to graduate from high school.

In 1966, Ms. Parton married Carl Dean, an asphalt contractor who shunned the limelight. The couple had met two years earlier, at a laundromat in Nashville, when Ms. Parton was 18. Mr. Dean died in 2025.

Ms. Parton is survived by six of her siblings: Willadeene Parton, Robert Lee Parton Jr., Stella Parton, Cassie Parton, Freida Parton and Rachel Ann Parton George.

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In 1966, Ms. Parton married Carl Dean, an asphalt contractor who shunned the limelight. He died in 2025.Credit...Instagram

In 1965, Ms. Parton signed a recording contract with Monument Records, not long before she and her uncle wrote two Top 10 country songs for the singer Bill Phillips. She released the first of her roughly 90 Top 40 country hits — “Dumb Blonde,” a plucky denunciation of female stereotypes — in 1966.

In 1967, she began her seven-year tenure with “The Porter Wagoner Show.” She and Mr. Wagoner would go on to release 21 hit duets together, including “Holding On to Nothin’” (1968) and “Just Someone I Used to Know” (1969).

But with the arrival of the 1970s — and in no small part because of the national exposure she received on Mr. Wagoner’s show — Ms. Parton started to eclipse her employer in popularity.

The tension that resulted was further aggravated when she began steadily producing No. 1 country singles like “Joshua” and “Jolene.” Ms. Parton parted ways with Mr. Wagoner in 1974 to concentrate on her solo career, but not before writing “I Will Always Love You” as an expression of gratitude and farewell.

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Ms. Parton performing during a three-night run at the Bottom Line in Manhattan in 1977, an engagement that The New York Times called “a triumph.”Credit...Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times

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Ms. Parton at the Country Music Association Awards in Nashville in 1978.Credit...Associated Press

The separation initially proved difficult for Ms. Parton, both emotionally and financially, but it also opened doors to new opportunities like the chance to host her own TV show. She was named female artist of the year by the Country Music Association in each of the first two years (1975 and 1976) after her break with Mr. Wagoner.

Embracing a more pop approach than she had earlier in her career, Ms. Parton continued her ascendance on the charts in the late ’70s with blockbuster hits like “Here You Come Again” and “Heartbreaker.” Both were No. 1 country singles that crossed over to the pop Top 40. The Country Music Association awarded her its top honor, entertainer of the year, in 1978.

After her 1980 recording of “9 to 5” earned her two Grammy Awards and an Oscar nomination, Ms. Parton turned her attention to movies, TV appearances and the development, in the mid-1980s, of Dollywood, her Smoky Mountain theme park, among other business ventures.

In 1987, she released the first of her two albums with Ms. Ronstadt and Ms. Harris, the platinum-selling “Trio.” She hosted “Saturday Night Live” in 1989 and teamed up with Ms. Lynn and Ms. Wynette to record the album “Honky Tonk Angels” in 1993.

She published her memoir, “Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business,” a New York Times best seller, in 1994. The next year, she established the Imagination Library, a philanthropic endeavor through which more than 200 million books have been distributed to babies and young children.

She gave back generously to Sevier County, her home county in Tennessee. In the early 1990s, she began offering $500 to local high school graduates, to help lower the dropout rate; in 2000, she added five $15,000 college scholarships. In 2007, she held a benefit concert to raise money for a new hospital in the county.

In 2016, Ms. Parton organized a telethon, “Smoky Mountains Rise,” which raised over $9 million after devastating wildfires in eastern Tennessee, and she funded grants for families whose homes had been destroyed. In 2024, after Hurricane Helene, she, her foundation and her businesses gave $2 million toward relief efforts.

She also donated $1 million in 2017 to the Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, in honor of a niece who had been treated for leukemia there. She gave another $1 million to Vanderbilt in 2020 to help fund the development of Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine, and $1 million more for pediatric infectious disease research in 2022.

Endowed with a surfeit of creativity and an unflagging work ethic, Ms. Parton admitted in interviews to sleeping as few as three hours a night. She was nominated for more than 50 Grammy Awards, 10 of which she won, along with being recognized for lifetime achievement by the Recording Academy in 2011. A show about her life, “Dolly: A True Original Musical,” is scheduled to open on Broadway in early 2027.

Ms. Parton was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1999 and the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2001, and was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 2005. In 2022, she was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

But perhaps even more remarkable than the profusion of accolades and awards was Ms. Parton’s unstinting generosity of spirit — her commitment, born of deep religious convictions and an immense heart, to seeing the humanity in all people.

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Ms. Parton and her goddaughter, Miley Cyrus, onstage at the Grammy Awards in 2019.Credit...Kevin Winter/Getty Images

Ms. Parton not only sang the traditional Southern gospel music her mother taught her; she also wrote and sang “Travelin’ Thru,” an Oscar-nominated song from “Transamerica,” the 2005 movie about a transgender woman seeking to connect with her son. In 2017, Ms. Parton collaborated with Miley Cyrus, her goddaughter, to record “Rainbowland,” a tribute to gay pride and liberation.

“You have to accept everything and everybody,” she said in “Songteller,” talking about the lessons to be learned about open-mindedness and inclusion from “Coat of Many Colors.”

Time and again in her career, Ms. Parton reflected on her impoverished upbringing and how she followed her dreams to escape it. “I wanted to be free,” she told Rolling Stone in 1977. “I had my songs to sing, I had an ambition, and it burned inside me.”

She added: “It was something I knew would take me out of the mountains. I knew I could see worlds beyond the Smoky Mountains.”

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Ms. Parton onstage in 2025. A few years ago, The New York Times ran a story with the headline “Is There Anything We Can All Agree On? Yes: Dolly Parton.”Credit...Jason Kempin/Getty Images

 

Dave Marsh, Rock Critic Who Loved Springsteen and Hated the Dead, Dies at 76

 

A passionately opinionated veteran of Creem and Rolling Stone, he was part of a generation of writers who influenced how the world saw the golden age of rock.

By Alex Williams

Dave Marsh, an influential and idiosyncratic rock critic who championed passion over polish, helped catapult Bruce Springsteen to fame and damned the Grateful Dead as “the worst band in creation,” died on Friday at his home in Norwalk, Conn. He was 76.

The cause was complications of posterior cortical atrophy, a form of dementia, his wife, Barbara Carr, said.

Mr. Marsh, a star writer and editor for Creem, the taste-shaping Detroit rock magazine, and Rolling Stone, was among a generation of pioneering critics, including Lester Bangs, Jon Landau and Greil Marcus, who shaped how the world saw the golden age of rock.

He could be quirky. In a list of the 30 greatest rock ’n’ roll guitarists included in “The Book of Rock Lists” (1981, written with Kevin Stein), he ranked Carl Wilson of the Beach Boys — a celestial voice, but no one’s idea of a shredder — above the fretboard leviathans Jimmy Page and Duane Allman.

“He was born with the DNA of a contrarian,” Mr. Landau, who went on to manage and produce Mr. Springsteen, said in an interview. “He loved to argue, sometimes just for the sake of arguing.”

But the opinions Mr. Marsh held, he held with conviction. Mr. Marcus once described his work as “heartfelt, heart on your sleeve, blood in your mouth.”

With tastes that ran from the Supremes to the Sex Pistols — with heavy helpings of garage rock, soul, R&B and heartland rock from Bob Seger along the way — Mr. Marsh, proud of his blue-collar origins, was a music populist as well as what Mr. Landau called a “classicist” who steered clear of ephemeral fashions.

The mission of rock, he once wrote, was to bring “a glorious possibility, a chance to communicate across all the gaps in our society — gaps of class, race, region, gender, generation, education.”

Given that Mr. Springsteen’s goal was similar, it was little wonder that, among the more than two dozen books that Mr. Marsh published, including appraisals of Elvis Presley, George Clinton and the Who, five were about the bard of the Jersey swamps, starting with the best-selling “Born to Run: The Bruce Springsteen Story” (1979), the first major biography of the artist.

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Mr. Marsh in 1981, signing his Bruce Springsteen biography, “Born to Run.” The critic Greil Marcus once described Mr. Marsh’s work as “heartfelt, heart on your sleeve, blood in your mouth.”Credit...Deborah Feingold/Corbis, via Getty Images

“My great friend Dave, with his straight-out-of-Detroit attitude, was a true rock ’n’ roll lifer,” Mr. Springsteen wrote on social media after Mr. Marsh’s death.

“He deeply believed in what I was trying to accomplish,” Mr. Springsteen added, “and his lifetime of support meant the world to me.”

A connoisseur of raw minimalism, Mr. Marsh was one of the first journalists to use the term punk rock, in a 1971 Creem column about the Michigan garage rockers ? and the Mysterians (Question Mark and the Mysterians). In 1993, he published an entire book on a timeless three-chord frat-house raver, “Louie Louie: The History and Mythology of the World’s Most Famous Rock ’n’ Roll Song.”

To him, rock did not need filigreed solos or 24-track production to touch the heart. What good music required, he believed, was emotional authenticity.

In his 1989 book, “The Heart of Rock & Soul: The 1,001 Greatest Singles Ever Made,” considered a landmark of music criticism, he listed at No. 1 Marvin Gaye’s recording of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine.” That 1968 version of the song, he wrote, isn’t “a plea to save a love affair; it’s Marvin Gaye’s essay on salvaging the human spirit.”

Mr. Marsh’s 1989 book, “The Heart of Rock & Soul: The 1,001 Greatest Singles Ever Made,” is considered a landmark of music criticism.Credit...Grand Central Publishing

In a Rolling Stone review of Patti Smith’s vulnerable and brutal 1978 album “Easter,” he called her “the most profoundly religious American popular performer since Jim Morrison.”

Conversely, he felt that the bombastic music of progressive rock bands like Emerson, Lake & Palmer and Yes, with their Carnegie Hall-worthy orchestral arrangements and virtuoso musicianship, was “truly arrogant,” as he wrote in Rolling Stone in 1977, “because it refuses to articulate just what moods its complex structures are meant to evoke.”

He reserved equal ire for what he considered slick, soulless corporate rock. In “The New Rolling Stone Record Guide” (1983), he gave every one of Journey’s nine albums up to that point — including the 1981 juggernaut “Escape,” which sold over 10 million copies — one out of five stars.

The band, he wrote, “made records perfectly calculated to be inserted into FM radio playlists: ‘Stepford Wives’ rock, dead on its feet without any awareness of the utter triviality.”

In the same record guide, Mr. Marsh called the Grateful Dead, with their interminable space jams and druggy aura, an “assertedly major oeuvre that’s virtually worthless except for documentary purposes.” In a Rolling Stone review of Queen’s 1978 album, “Jazz,” he said the group “may be the first truly fascist rock band.”

History did not always prove him right. A Dylan admirer, he nevertheless panned “Blood on the Tracks” (1975), now roundly hailed as a masterpiece, writing, “The long songs, particularly, suffer from flat, tangled imagery, and the music, with all its hints at the old glory, is often incompetently performed.”

As he said in a 1987 interview with The Washington Post, “I was always a hard-ass in terms of my opinions.”

David Rodney Marsh was born on March 1, 1950, in Pontiac, Mich., the eldest of three children of Oliver Marsh, a labor relations officer for the Grand Trunk Western Railroad, and Mary (Evon) Marsh, a teacher’s assistant.

He grew up listening to R&B records at the height of the Motown era, and the music helped him realize that “all the inequality and segregation and racism I had been brought up with had to be wrong,” he said in a 1989 radio interview with the author Studs Terkel.

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Mr. Marsh with Little Richard at the South by Southwest music festival in Austin, Texas, in 2004.Credit...Gary Miller/Getty Images

He wrote for the newspapers at Waterford Kettering High School, outside Detroit, from which he graduated in 1968, and at Wayne State University, which he abandoned after a year.

At 19, he “talked my way into Creem,” he later recalled. He became the “spark plug” for the magazine, as Mr. Landau put it, helping define the publication’s hard-edge Detroit sensibility and giving an early stamp of approval to ferocious local bands like Iggy and the Stooges and the MC5, who created a blueprint for punk rock.

After rising to become the editor in chief of Creem, Mr. Marsh left in the early 1970s because of mounting tensions with Barry Kramer, the magazine’s publisher.

He moved to the Boston area and began writing for The Real Paper, a trailblazing alternative newspaper. In the spring of 1974, he and Mr. Landau headed to the Harvard Square Theater to check out a shaggy troubadour out of Asbury Park, N.J.

“I expected nothing,” Mr. Marsh later wrote. “I got everything.”

He became a close friend of Mr. Springsteen’s, as well as a leading interpreter of his work; his wife, Ms. Carr, helped Mr. Landau manage Mr. Springsteen. The cozy relationship drew scrutiny, which Mr. Marsh did not duck.

“Hidden conflicts of interest are not good,” he wrote in the introduction to his 1987 biography, “Glory Days: Bruce Springsteen in the 1980s.” “Open conflicts of interest are part of the story.”

In the early 1980s, Mr. Marsh was a founder of Rock & Roll Confidential, a left-wing monthly newsletter that billed itself as “the Voice of the Undesirable Element,” exploring music, censorship and corporate greed.

Later that decade, he collaborated with Mary Morello, who would become the chief opponent of Tipper Gore, the future second lady, in a widely publicized battle over labeling records for potentially offensive content.

“If you don’t think a label is a form of censorship,” he told The Miami Herald in 1988. “Ask anyone who had to wear a yellow star in Nazi Germany.”

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Mr. Marsh, left, in 2010 with Mr. Springsteen and Steven Van Zandt, a member of Mr. Springsteen’s band, at a fund-raiser in New York City to benefit the Kristen Ann Carr Fund, named after Mr. Marsh’s stepdaughter, who died of cancer in 1993.Credit...Kevin Mazur/WireImage

In more recent years, he was a host, with Jim Rotolo, of “E Street Radio,” a weekly program for Springsteen fanatics, and presided over another music show, “Kick Out the Jams,” both on SiriusXM.

In addition to his wife, he is survived by a step-grandchild and a sister, Paula Seguna. Mr. Marsh’s stepdaughter Sasha Carr died in 2024. Another stepdaughter, Kristen Ann Carr, died of sarcoma in 1993 and inspired the creation of a fund in her name supporting cancer research and patient care, for which Mr. Marsh helped raise money.

While Mr. Marsh was known for his fierce advocacy for baby-boomer staples like the Beatles and Motown, his tastes evolved with the times, and he came to see hip-hop as a more earthshaking populist art form than punk. In 1992, the newsletter he edited changed its title to Rock & Rap Confidential.

“Do I think that the revolution in white rock ’n’ roll, or in part of white rock ’n’ roll, that happened in England and was stillborn in the United States with punk, approaches the significance of the rise of rap music?” he said in an interview with the writer Scott Woods. “That’s a silly idea.”

 NEW YORK TIMES 

Alex Williams

Obituaries reporter

1. Marsh left an unusually large imprint on my music tastes as a teenager — although I never could quite figure out how Carl Wilson of the Beach Boys was a better guitarist than Jimmy Page.