I love Dolly. She is the queen of self-branding, forging a 50 year career and a multi-million dollar fortune out of looking like a blonde bimbo. Her music - performing and songwriting - aren't shabby either.

Born in 1946, one of twelve children all living in a hillbilly shack in the Tennessee mountains, Dolly - yes, that is her real name - started writing songs as a child. When she left school - the first in her family to actually graduate - she packed up and moved to Nashville, hoping to make a career out of her passion for lyrics and that lilting, childlike voice. The first success she made was meeting her husband, the camera-shy Carl Dean, who picked her up outside a launderette. The second was joining Porter Wagoner's TV show (their acrimonious split lead to Dolly penning 'I Will Always Love You', later recorded by Whitney Houston). Hits like 'Jolene' and 'Here You Come Again', film roles (including my favourite Steel Magnolias), her own theme park Dollywood, plus a publishing company, production company and other ventures have made Dolly a household name. Not forgetting her trademark wigs, tight-fitting glam clothing, false nails - and her most famous, very natural assets.

Randy L. Schmidt has put together a biography in Dolly's own words, collecting together key interviews from her first for Music City News in 1967, through Rolling Stone, Playboy, Cosmopolitan, to Maclean's in 2014. (Dolly did write an autobiography in 1994, but apparently wasn't happy with the end result.) Randy notes in the introduction that Dolly turned 70 in 2016, but rather than viewing this milestone as the end of her career, this compilation is more of another 'story so far...' Dolly is still recording, and still fabulous.

The interviews do tend to cover the same ground, opening with the same potted history, asking the same questions (which Dolly sometimes answers with the same soundbites), but there are some gems in there too, and more importantly, we get a true sense of this shrewd lady, who sounds so friendly but won't be tricked into telling more than she wants you to know. As one interviewer notes, 'She's just so damn different from anybody else - a self-created creature with an enormous talent and a heart just as big' ( )