Nashville:

She is a monument to make believe, apparently constructed top-to-toe from lipstick, powder and silicone. And yet Dolly Parton might just be the most down-to-earth star. The best thing is, no one is more aware of the contradiction than Parton herself.

“If there’s a magic in me,” she says, “it’s the fact that I look so artificial but I am so totally real. My songs and my talent came from a very real, serious place. But the way I looked was so cartoonish, still is, that a lot of people couldn’t look past that.”

Parton is one of country music’s most prolific, and best, songwriters, with some 3,000 songs to her name. But Parton is sharply aware that bankability is not the same as credibility, and that some of her commercial decisions have taken the shine off her reputation as a major international artist.

“I’ve lived long enough to outgrow a lot of it,” she says. “...I take my songwriting very seriously. It’s only those people that have followed me over the years and really know my work that know how serious I am about all of it — including the way I look.”

There’s something formidable about her as she warms to her theme. “You can’t take my high heels from me, you can’t have my long fingernails, you can’t take all this hair from me, because it’s part of this thing that I’ve become. I wouldn’t want to give any of it up. Do I have to be ugly to be a songwriter? This is the way I am, and it’s what I choose to be.” Parton, now 60, settled on her look when still a little girl growing up in a dirt-poor sharecropping family with six brothers and five sisters in Locust Ridge, Tennessee. Back then, one of Parton’s idols was the under-appreciated honky-tonk and bluegrass singer Rose Maddox. Her powerful vocals were inspirational — and so were the group’s outfits.

Parton still remembers their cowboys suits covered with rhinestones in elaborate designs.

“That was the first time I’d ever seen that flashy stuff on people,” she says. “I thought, ‘That’s what you need to be, you need to shine if you’re going to be a star.’ I’m a fanatic about it to this day. I can’t go out and sing in plain clothes — I feel like I’m naked. I have to have something that shines.”

There is an uncomplicated sincerity when she talks about her background, how she came to be the star she is now. She grew up in a shack with an outside toilet in the Tennessee mountains, and her earliest musical role-models were among her own family. “My mother’s people were very musical, so I was very influenced by this one aunt of mine, Dorothy Jo Owens, my mum’s sister, and my uncle Bill Owens, my mum’s brother. They were my heroes.”

She started out performing, at the age of 10, on TV and radio shows sponsored by the local grocers. It was a sharp contrast to home, where she and her siblings slept three and four to a bed, and electricity could be used only sparingly. “We joked that we had running water when we would run and get it,” she laughs.

She claims she was writing songs before she could write, or at least making them up in her head. She made her first recording, Puppy Love, when she was “between 10 and 12” and had her first proper contract at 15, with Mercury.

In 1964, at the age of 18, she moved to Nashville. She graduated from school “on a Friday night and came to Nashville the next morning. I’d been waiting years to get here. It’s always scary when you leave home, especially when you grew up like me. I’d never been away from all those kids, or Mummy and Daddy. It was very lonesome — I almost died of homesickness for the longest time. For years, actually.

“My heart wanted to go back, but my head needed to stay, because my dream had always been to be a singer and I wasn’t coming home until I had something to show for it.”

In 1966, she had her first taste of success, when a song she had written with her uncle, Put It Off Until Tomorrow, became a hit for the singer Bill Phillips. “It has become a country classic,” says Parton, “and that was really when I made my mark as a songwriter.”

And the following year, she became a country star in her own right, with her recording of the song Dumb Blonde. Unusually, Parton didn’t write the lyrics herself, but they could still stand as a personal manifesto: “Just because I’m blonde, don’t think I’m dumb, ‘cause this dumb blonde ain’t nobody’s fool.” Since then, her songs have been covered by the likes of Merle Haggard and Emmylou Harris.

Her mission statement is simple: make people happy. “I love people, I’m very outgoing, and I just love to share,” she says. “I have a lot of energy, I love to talk and kid around. I get a kick out of people getting a kick out of me. I like to shock ‘em just for the reaction.” Unusually for someone so prominent, she’s managed to keep her relationship with her husband, businessman Carl Dean, completely private. In May the couple celebrated their 40th anniversary together, yet Dean remains as invisible to the media as ever.

The couple have never had children, but remain close to their extended family — so extensive that when they gather for Christmas there can be 100 people in the room. Parton thanks her family for keeping her rooted. “It’s so easy to get scattered in this world, especially in this business,” she says. “Any time I stray too far away, all I have to do is anchor myself, close my eyes, write a song about home and it keeps me there. Some people want to get away, but I never did. I was always proud of my people, I was always proud to be a country girl — and I take that with me all over the world.”