But Parton's career as a star does have one major drawback: It may have drained too much attention (and perhaps some of her own energy) from Dolly Parton the singer. Anyone who's ever flicked on a radio knows the hits, glossy gumdrops like "Two Doors Down," "9 to 5" and "Here You Come Again."

But I think there are still too many potential fans who hold those hits against her -- and before I go any further, I should note that the reason I've been so tough on hip country fans who haven't caught on to Dolly is that, until 10 years ago, I was pretty clueless myself. A friend of mine at the time, one of the truest country fans I've ever known, casually mentioned what a great singer she was. (He also noted her skill as a guitarist, which seemed doubly unbelievable to me, given those devilish fingernails.) I resisted even further -- until I heard "Coat of Many Colors," Parton's autobiographical song about the ridicule she experienced as a young schoolgirl when she wore the patchwork coat her mother had lovingly made for her.

You might hear "Coat of Many Colors" and call it a tearjerker. I call it a heartbreaker, a song that has the power to change you, subtly, forever, maybe not so much for the subject matter as for the way Parton sings it. The song's lyrics are simply written, a straightforward narrative: "Although we had no money/I was rich as I could be/in my coat of many colors that my mama made for me." It's the quaver in Parton's voice, a steel-forged mix of fragility and determination, that make the song so affecting. Parton's voice stands alone among living country singers, but it also stands as one of the greatest country voices of all time. Her plaintive, shivering phrases come straight from the mountains, though not from the earth: She skims through a song the way a brook trips and trickles over little stones -- there's both merriment and stately beauty in it.

You can get a sense of the fineness of Parton's vocal texture by listening to her own recording of "I Will Always Love You," playing it against Whitney Houston's megahuge, bloated version of the song. (No need to actually put the Houston version on the turntable; simply playing it in your head is torture enough.) A guitar motif washed with mournful sunset colors opens Parton's version; when she steps in, she handles the lyrics with the cautious tenderness of a farm girl carrying a jumble of newly hatched chicks in her apron. She's aware of the fragility of what she's holding, and of its fleetingness: Unlike a passel of chicks, it's destined to soon fly away from her forever. Houston's version, on the other hand, is an overbearing monstrosity, nothing but a vehicle for her windup-toy melisma. She works the inherent wistfulness of the song as if it were pie dough, rolling and patting it until it's thick and heavy and tough. Parton's reading packs boundless, if restrained, passion into phrases that barely rise above a whisper.

I'd say that of all her country contemporaries, living or dead, Parton is the most sensuous. Her voice has so much shimmering life to it, as well as a kind of voluptuousness -- it's the voice of someone who's eager to take everything in. Even if Parton sometimes sings of restraint, her music is never about repression. That's confirmed by the way she writes about sex in her autobiography: "All my life ... I have been driven by three things; three mysteries I wanted to know more about; three passions. They are God, music and sex. I would like to say that I have listed them in the order of their importance to me, but their pecking order is subject to change without warning."

Even if Parton tends to revel in melodrama (and melodrama is, after all, essential to country music), she never quite succumbs to the self-pitying victimization that so many female country singers slip into. She claims she wrote "Just Because I'm a Woman" as the result of her husband's asking her if he was the first man she'd ever slept with; the honesty of her answer hurt him deeply. But Parton couldn't change the truth, and she didn't feel she should apologize for it. The song addresses the hypocrisy of a certain kind of man who'll sleep with one type of woman but look for "an angel to wear his wedding band." It's not so much that Parton's statement was ahead of its time in the way it addressed the notion of women's sexual freedom (the song was released in 1968), but it represents a sensibility that wouldn't have been common among her peers, professional or otherwise. Parton, who considers herself a Christian as well as a deeply spiritual person, is unfettered by the Bible Belt notion (still extant today and not just in the Bible Belt) that sex should never be spoken of, let alone enjoyed.

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