Credit: Far Out / Universal Pictures
When Dolly Parton first tasted success in the 1970s, she didn’t believe that the good times would keep rolling for a lifetime, and instead, thought she needed to make the most of her limited time in the sun.
The music industry has always had a tendency to build artists up, only to then knock them down, let them rot in the rubble, and replace them with the latest shiny toy, signed up on unfavourable contract terms, from the ever-revolving door of talent.
In 2026, many will argue that it’s never been harder for artists to remain in the limelight. There are over 100,000 new songs being updated to Spotify daily, and not enough time in the day for an average person to keep up to date with even one per cent of them.
However, even back in the ’70s, when the industry was beginning to take shape as it is today, it was already a cut-throat beast that produced countless more one-hit wonders than artists that were ready for a long and sustainable career.
While the musical landscape is now filled with elder statesmen figures, like The Rolling Stones releasing a new album in their mid-80s or Bob Dylan consistently touring provincial American towns at 85, younger artists didn’t have those lifers to look up to when they were beginning.
Before Parton finally gained attention in the late ’70s, a decade after her recording career began, she was under no illusion that the hits would keep coming forever, and spoke candidly to Playboy in 1977 about where she viewed herself.
She admitted, “Most people say in this business the life span of a career is five years from the time you really get hot to the time you start getting colder.”
However, Parton then used an example of an artist that had gone out of fashion, who she viewed as yesterday’s news, which couldn’t have aged much worse, adding, “Like an Elton John. Maybe I shouldn’t call names.”
She elaborated, “That’s just what I heard, that you don’t expect to really be the hottest except for maybe five years, and with a TV show, it’s usually a three-to-five-year thing, and then you cool off, people have seen what you do. I think maybe I am right now starting in my first year of from one to five. That’s what I’d like to think.”
As someone who didn’t live through 1977, it sounds ludicrous for Elton John to have ever been viewed as a has-been, considering how his songs have occupied an omnipresent place in the cultural space throughout my lifetime.
However, it hasn’t always been plain sailing for ‘The Rocketman’, who has had to fight for his spot at the top of the musical hierarchy.
From the start to the mid-’70s, John was an unstoppable force, who had both fans and critics eating out of the palm of his hands, with 1975’s Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy selling close to one-and-a-half million copies in a matter of days.
However, 1976’s Blue Moves was the start of a less commercially successful era, albeit by John’s high standards, and Parton likely wasn’t alone in believing that his best days were firmly behind him.
For several years, it did seem this way until he roared back into fashion with Too Low for Zero in 1983, which saw him stick two fingers in the air at any doubters who had dared to write him off in favour of the latest flash in the pan.
Admittedly, there was another lull in the late ’80s, but John found a way to make a huge resurgence again in the ’90s, and since then, he’s been viewed as a legendary figure who can, essentially, do no wrong.
Any artist who has been at the top as long as Elton John will have been through peaks and troughs along the way; it’s how they bounce back from these defeats that matters most.
Parton herself has had to show the same level of resilience to maintain her position, too. On the whole, her comments on the industry were accurate. However, in this case, she used the wrong example and made the grave mistake of underestimating Elton.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source faroutmagazine.co.uk ’
