Dolly Parton has never been afraid to say what she thinks. And back in 1968, she put one very personal truth straight into a song, even though she knew not everyone would want to hear it.
The song was Just Because I’m a Woman, the title track of her 1968 album. And according to Dolly herself, it came straight from real life.
As she told Rolling Stone in a 2003 interview, the trouble started after she and her husband, Carl Dean, had been married about eight months. Things were happy. Then Carl asked whether he was the first man she had ever been with. Dolly told him the truth. He was not.
“It broke his heart. He could not get over that for the longest time. I thought, ‘Well, my goodness, what’s the big damn deal?'”
She turned that moment into music. The lyrics said exactly what she felt:
“My mistakes are no worse than yours just because I’m a woman.”
For 1968, that was a bold thing to say out loud, let alone put on a record. Some radio stations in the U.S. refused to play it. The sentiment was simply too much for them.
But women in South Africa felt differently. The song went all the way to number one there. Dolly laughed about it years later, saying she had many fans among what she called “all those oppressed women.”
It was not the last time Dolly ran into that kind of pushback. In 1991, she released The Eagle When She Flies. Once again, plenty of DJs refused to spin it. Once again, they called it a women ‘s-lib song.
Dolly never changed her tune, literally or figuratively. She has spent more than fifty years writing and recording exactly what she believes, and she has never let the critics slow her down.
If you remember hearing Just Because I’m a Woman back in the day, you already know Dolly has always been ahead of her time.