Imma need y’all to quit coming for Queen Dolly.
An old interview from 2003 has resurfaced where Oprah interviewed Dolly Parton, around the time the tribute album, Just Because I’m a Woman: Songs of Dolly Parton, was released.
Dolly was on Oprah’s show to talk about the new record and some of the artists who were featured on it, like Shania Twain, Alison Krauss, Emmylou Harris and Dolly herself.
People who’ve never seen the old video prior to this year have taken issue with some of the questions Oprah presented, the way the were asked, as well as the reasoning for her to even ask some of them at all.
Of course, looking back on this interview almost 20 years later does give it you a bit of a different perspective. I think we can all agree that times have changed quite a bit in almost two decades.
It reminds me a lot of the way Barbara Walters questioned Dolly in a similar fashion back in 1977, though, where Barb implied that Dolly looked like a joke and didn’t take herself seriously as a person or an artist.
This time, O comes for Dolly by asking her how she’s defying age with her beauty secrets. Dolly tries to play it coy:
“Oh, I don’t know, just I’m a cartoon, so I just look the same all the time. Same thing, I just put mine on.”
Oprah, not liking the response she got, presses Dolly to own up to the plastic surgery that she’s quite open to talking about in public, saying:
“No, you’ve been open about, you’ve had some work done. Some tucks and pulls and sucks.”
To which Dolly responded gracefully and hysterically, saying:
“Yes I have, and I’ll have some more when I need ’em. I have a funny little thing I was telling the girls, all the girls that sang on this tribute album, a lot of ’em are very young.
I said, ‘I was already into plastic surgery when they were still sleeping on plastic sheets!'”
Check out the exchange for yourself:
The second video is the one receiving the majority of the backlash. It’s mainly because of the fact that Oprah comes for Dolly by questioning her about her mental health and depression she’d gone through years prior to the interview.
She doesn’t do it before commenting on the size of Dolly’s boobs and the way she looks first, though.
Again, Dolly owns up to every part of who she is:
“I’m kind of like a show dog, you know I just have to keep myself up if I’m gonna be at it.”
Then, Oprah comes back with this:
“I heard that you look at your boobs as show dogs, or show horses, right? And you say you have to keep them groomed.”
Of course, Dolly is 20 steps ahead of her and comes back with a phenomenal response:
“Well, I do. I call these my weapons of mass distraction.
But anyways, truly, I just do whatever I need to do. And I wear a lot of makeup, and I wear a lot of wigs.”
The next question is where Oprah gets quite personal:
“When like, you hit your 40’s, I heard you went into a huge depression. Did you?”
And, for like the 3rd time in this interview, Dolly gives an honest and graceful response:
“That wasn’t ‘cuz I was 40, that’s just ‘cuz I was fat and 40!
I really had a lot of problems during that time with a lot of female problems. Just hormones, and it was just a depression thing I went through just from changing around.
But I’m okay now, it’s one of the best things that happened to me ‘cuz it made me take inventory. I’d never slowed up. I’d been workin’ since I was 10 years old.”
I’ll admit, it doesn’t look much better when you read the interview in print, either. From what I’ve gathered in the comments of both of these videos, fans are irked that Oprah’s fishing for some sort of reaction and asking Dolly all kinds of “gotcha” questions that aren’t really fair.
On the other hand, some are defending Oprah and saying that this is typical for her and she’s known to be tough in any interview, regardless of who she’s talking to.
I think Oprah just seems annoyed and frustrated that Dolly isn’t giving her the answers she wants. Moreover, it annoys her that Dolly does it all with incredible amounts of charm.
To me, it’s just another lesson on why Dolly is a national treasure and true gem of a human being that we do not deserve.
Here’s the full interview, including the second part about Doll’s depression:
