Hello Dolly: country's blonde bombshell Multifaceted: Dolly Parton There are many sides to Dolly Parton: entertainer, actor, business woman, philanthropist, multi-instrumentalist and owner of world-famous breasts. But the first thing to remember is that she is a songwriter. One of pop and country music's great songwriters. There are the hits - 9 to 5, Jolene, Coat of Many Colors and Here You Come Again - but they are just a tiny sample of her output. At 67, Parton has written more than 3000 songs, ranging from country and pop to folk and, more recently, bluegrass. She is showing no signs of slowing - despite being injured in a car accident the week before our interview. She was trapped in her SUV when it was T-boned at a Nashville intersection. "Oh I'm faaarne," she says in that familiar Southern drawl. [The media] made it out to be bigger than it was ... But actually, it could have been much worse - thank God it wasn't. Anything could have happened, but we're back in business now. I'm just a little swollen right here," she says, waving at her buxom chest, before bursting into the heartiest of laughs. Dolly Parton is on. Despite looking fatigued and a little pale, she is warm, receptive and as sweet and homely as apple pie. Breasts aside, she's petite and looks slim in a form-fitting maroon top and dark pants. The tussled blonde locks of her wig complete her signature look. We are at Nashville's Northstar Studios, Parton's base for three days of solid promotion for her Blue Smoke world tour, which will reach New Zealand and Australia in February. On tour, she and her long-time backing group the Mighty Fine Band will mix classics with songs that get less airtime and tracks from her coming album, Blue Smoke. We put together a show that's different, certainly different enough. There's enough of the hits ... but we've got some new comedy stuff, some new gospel stuff, some new country/family things and, in addition to that, the new medleys of some of the hits that people miss," she says. Parton is excited about her third visit to Australia, having enjoyed a warm reception here in 2011. We had ... such wonderful crowds and when we got back home, everybody wanted us to come back ... We thought, 'Why not? Let's just go back, if they love us that much and we're still hot'. It is fair to say that Parton is still hot. Few entertainers enjoy careers that run into the decades, and few play arena shows around the world at the age of 67. The decision to dedicate her life to showbiz came early. Growing up on a farm in Tennessee's Great Smoky Mountains, she was the fourth of 12 children. She had other siblings who liked to sing but her uncle, Bill Owen, realised she had something special. He took her to perform in churches and county fairs before hitting Nashville. "He was always impressed with my songwriting," Parton says. So we were kind of like a little team and he encouraged me a great deal. She remembers one spot on a television show in the city. I was little. I was about 10 years old - and I got, like, an encore," she says. They kept making me sing the same song over and over again ... When I left that day, I said to my uncle, 'They liked me, didn't they? They liked me? I think I just knew then. I said, 'This is what I'm gonna do. I'm just always gonna do this'. Despite successful forays into Hollywood in the '80s - playing a hot-blooded Southern secretary in 9 to 5 (1980), a feisty madam in the musical The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1982) and a salon owner in Steel Magnolias (1989) - Parton continued to perform and flourish on stage. Unlike fellow Tennessee resident Elvis Presley, who almost became a prisoner to making movies, Hollywood seemed to help propel her music to new heights. In 1980, she had three No. 1 hits in a row, with Starting Over Again, Old Flames Can't Hold a Candle to You and 9 to 5. Although she is quick to joke about her famous breasts (she quipped on Ellen that if she had a wardrobe malfunction like Janet Jackson's she'd "take out the first three rows"), Parton has always been a smart businesswoman, not afraid to make hard decisions. When Elvis asked to sing I Will Always Love You, she refused his manager, Colonel Tom Parker, who was demanding a 50 per cent share of the royalties. "I couldn't do that to my publishing company, to the copyright [but] I still would have loved to have Elvis [sing it]," she says wistfully. At any rate, Whitney Houston didn't do a bad job with the song on The Bodyguard soundtrack in 1992. Between Houston's version and her own, the song has netted Parton millions. Her business ventures stretch from a restaurant in Honolulu to a line of wigs for Revlon. She owns her own label, Dolly Records. Then there's the theme park. Dollywood, in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains, employs some 3000 people and is undergoing a $US300 million expansion. She says it's a way of giving back to the place where she grew up. I felt that, if I make it, I needed to have something up here to honour my father and my mother, my father's name, to do something for my people, to provide jobs. I knew it would be a good business venture for myself so it is a win-win. We're all prosperin'. Her family and community also inspired the Imagination Library, a project that aims to promote early childhood literacy by supplying free books every month to children under five. Parton's father was illiterate and, she says, could not even write his children's names. "I grew up in, as you know, a very poor family," she says. A lot of my relatives did not get a chance to go to school. From its roots in Tennessee, the charity expanded to Canada and the UK. "And now," says Parton, "we're coming to Australia ... 50 million books we've mailed out so far, and that's just startin'." Her husband of 47 years, Carl Thomas Dean, stays well away from the business empire, sticking to the farm they share outside Nashville. "We're together more than people think but he is not involved in the business," she says. He doesn't care about that. But he is a good guy, we're good friends and the fact that we're not both in the same business has worked out really well. For all her interests, Parton says she is a songwriter first. It is pure love. No matter what business things I've done ... it was always born out of the song. It was because of me wanting to write songs, sing songs, record songs, try to be an entertainer. Writing is still a daily habit. "In my mind, there is always a rhyme going on," she says. I write down something almost every day. If I don't write a song or piece of a song, I write a title or an idea. I've just got notes everywhere ... Everything inspires me. I've always got instruments all around. There is always a piano, whatever house I'm in. You never know what is going to be a hit. If everybody knew what was going to be the hit, we'd all be rich. We'd all be writers, too. I've been fortunate, but I write though all the time and some of my favourites will probably never be heard. There is one element of pop stardom Parton understands better than most: the power of sexual magnetism. She still remembers the startling impact of Johnny Cash when she first saw him perform. I saw him on stage and I was just a girl. I realise now he was probably doped up on drugs, but he had that charm and that charisma ... I didn't know what I wanted to do to him but it was something. Parton has traded on her sex appeal for decades. She posed (fully clothed) for the cover of Playboy in 1978 as a buxom bunny. For her, sex sold. But it's a strategy that can be fraught with peril for performers, as evidenced by Parton's goddaughter Miley Cyrus' rapid transition from wholesome Disney Channel character Hannah Montana to scantily clad, "twerking" performer at the MTV Video Music Awards - a performance that received a wave of criticism. "I'm her fairy godmother," Parton says. You'll never hear Billy Ray Cyrus - her dad - or me ever say anything bad about Miley because, first of all, we've known her ever since she was a baby. We both know how smart she is and how talented she is. Of course, you don't want them to cross a line but, in Miley's case people are never going to let her ... break the mould of that Hannah Montana. So I believe she felt like she had to just kill her off. Like she said, she had to murder Hannah Montana. And she did ... she made a smart move for her. Music, she says, is an increasingly tough business for young performers. I have to honestly say I do not understand a lot of what the business is in this day and time. I'm still an old-timer enough to kind of remember the old days. I would really hate to be starting out right now. Chances are, I would never have made it. You see all the shows like the The Voice and American Idol and America's Got Talent. You don't know ... how hard it is for those that didn't get on those shows to still be out there workin' it. For Parton, though, "workin' it" is her life. I will never stop writing and performing 'cause everything I am today ... was based on a song. It was a song that brought me out of the Smokey Mountains and it will be a song that will lay me back down in the ground in the Smokey Mountains. I'm sure they'll be singing one of my songs when I lay back down. Dolly Parton plays the Sydney Entertainment Centre on February 18 and the Hope Estate Winery, Hunter Valley, on February 15. Tickets are on sale now. Daniel Fallon travelled courtesy of Live Nation.