There’s a particular kind of book that only gets made once an artist has earned the right to look back over the whole span of a career and say, essentially, look what I built. “Star of the Show,” Dolly Parton’s new collaboration with music journalist Tom Roland, is exactly that book, and at this point in her six-decade run, she has more than earned it.
The premise is straightforward and unabashedly celebratory: a lavishly illustrated, oversize retrospective of Parton’s life as a live performer, from her earliest stage appearances through her years alongside Porter Wagoner and on into stadium tours and Vegas residencies. It’s the third installment in what has become an informal trilogy, following “Songteller,” which focused on her songwriting, and “Behind the Seams,” which covered her costumes. Where those books zoomed in on craft, “Star of the Show” zooms out to the performance itself — the stagecraft, the banter, the sheer physical stamina of a career built on showing up night after night and giving audiences everything.
The book’s real strength is its archive. Parton and Roland have assembled a trove of photographs, tour ephemera, and behind-the-scenes material that spans generations, and the personal commentary running alongside it has the warmth and self-deprecating humor that’s made Parton one of the most beloved figures in American entertainment. She’s candid about the complicated dynamics of her partnership with Wagoner, generous in crediting the duet partners and collaborators who shaped different eras of her act, and clear-eyed about the discipline it took to sustain a performing career this long without ever seeming to break a sweat in public.
Critical reception has been warm bordering on adoring, with reviewers consistently praising the book’s visual richness and the infectious, big-hearted tone of Parton’s own voice throughout. The most common note of qualification isn’t really a criticism so much as a description of the genre: this is a celebration, not an investigation, and readers looking for a warts-and-all reckoning with the harder chapters of a long career in entertainment won’t find much of that here. The book is organized around highlights rather than hard questions, and it doesn’t pretend otherwise — the closest thing to controversy is handled with the same generous, forward-looking spirit Parton brings to everything else.
That’s not really a flaw so much as a matter of knowing what this book is for. “Star of the Show” isn’t trying to be a critical biography; it’s a victory lap, assembled with genuine craft and clearly aimed at the millions of people who’ve spent decades in Parton’s audience and want the visual record to match the affection. On those terms, it succeeds completely. Fans will find it irresistible, casual admirers will come away understanding just how much work went into making six decades of performing look effortless, and even skeptics of the coffee-table-memoir format will have a hard time staying immune to Parton’s charm for three hundred-plus pages.
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