Guitarists have marveled for years at Dolly Parton’s ability to fret her guitar’s strings while wearing long acrylic nails. As the country music icon has revealed, those glamorous extensions — part of her signature look — have come in handy with her songwriting on one occasion when she created a tune that won numerous awards.
Parton is certainly no stranger to awards. She just received an honorary Oscar over the weekend for her dedication to charitable efforts. They include the Dollywood Foundation, which she created in 1988 to inspire children’s educational success, and Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, a monthly book-gifting program that’s provided more than 285 million books to children under the age of five.
The recognition from the movie industry is also a tribute to a film career that has co-existed alongside her life as a country music great. Parton has starred or appeared in more than a dozen movies, including 1982's The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (for which she won a Golden Globe Best Actress nomination), 1989’s Steel Magnolias and interpretations of her childhood and life, like Dolly Parton's Coat of Many Colors.
But her best-known film by far is the 1980 comedy 9 to 5, in which she costarred with actresses Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin. The film was based on an idea by Fonda about three women office workers who get even with their sexist, egotistical boss. Fonda championed Parton for her role as one of the women. Parton agreed to appear, but only if she could write the theme song.
As she explained, the tune came to her one day on the film set, while her guitar was in her trailer. And it was created with the help of those long acrylic nails.
“I was bored always in between takes because they have so much time between setups with lighting,” she explained on The Graham Norton Show. “And you just sit around, and what are you going to do?
“Part of my deal with Jane Fonda was, if I was in the movie, that I would get a chance to write the theme song.
“I didn't have chance to get my guitar or go back to my trailer, so I would just kind of roam around on the set, watching everything that was going on.”
Parton explains that as music ideas came to her on the set, she would clack her nails together to make a rhythm to help her visualize the song.
“I would take my nails, and because it was acrylic nails it makes like a percussive sound,” she says while demonstrating it for Norton. “It sounds like a typewriter, too.
“So I just started to write little words and things that I would see, and things I would think that would fit with that day-to-day nine-to-five job. Then I'd go back at night to my hotel room and put those things down.”
The technique was so successful that Parton gave her nails a shout-out on 9 to 5 and Odd Jobs, the album on which “9 to 5” is featured.
“I have a credit on the back of the album that says, ‘Nails by Dolly!’”
Of course, those long fingernails have been part of Dolly’s image for years, leading many to wonder how she manages to fret her acoustic guitar — usually one of the three-quarter-sized acoustic guitars that she's favored since her youth — while wearing them. She revealed in the same interview with Norton that she changes up her guitar’s tuning to allow her to use more finger nail–friendly barre chords.
“I've learned to do open tuning mostly for the when I'm writing and stuff,” she says.
Still, there are times when she admits she needs to get out the clippers and files and get down to business.
“If I'm really serious about it, I just have to saw ’em down!” she says.
Much of her playing style actually comes from her rhythmic right hand. Parton’s playing uses the Maybelle Carter-style "thumb and flick" approach combined with the Hank Williams/Johnny Cash alternating bass line style, in which the picking-hand thumb plucks a bass note followed by the first finger flicking down to sound the corresponding chord.
You can see Parton's open tunings and strumming style in action as she plays the title track from her 1973 album, My Tennessee Mountain Home, all while sporting her trademark nails. You can even hear her picking-hand nails on the guitar's body, adding a percussive element to her playing, similar to what she described above.
