There’s one less voice in the world now. Dolly Parton passed away on Tuesday. She was 80 years old, and she had been foreshadowing this on social media for a week or so. She was a natural songwriter with as unique a vision as any other and a greater sense of place than almost all of them. She was the connective tissue between the old-school country singers like the Carter Family and the superstars of the 1960s and 1970s and beyond. That is, until country music became the domain of a bunch of Night Ranger tribute bands. (Loretta Lynn probably came closer than anyone to Parton’s ability to summon up the mystery of misty mountain gaps and hollers.)
Dolly Parton put together several glorious albums with Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris. She wrote over 3,000 songs, and they were covered by practically everyone. From The New York Times:
Ms. Parton was one of country music’s greatest ambassadors, but she also collaborated widely with artists outside traditional Nashville circles, including Mavis Staples, Queen Latifah, Julio Iglesias and Ladysmith Black Mambazo. “Islands in the Stream,” a triple platinum-selling duet Ms Parton recorded with Kenny Rogers, topped both the country and pop charts in 1983. (The song was written by Barry, Maurice and Robin Gibb of the Bee Gees.) Stylistically, Ms. Parton’s music ran the gamut: mountain bluegrass and soul-inflected countrypolitan, disco-era pop and covers of classic rock touchstones written by Neil Young and Led Zeppelin—all of it rendered indelible by her irrepressible spirit and alternately keening and gossamer soprano drawl.
And this is my favourite bit of Partonalia: For 31 years, she had run what she called the Imagination Library, a service that delivers free books to children. There are outlets all over the United States and in four other countries. The project has dispersed over three hundred million books over those three decades. Back in March, because the president is a slug that attracts other slugs, Republican governors and state legislatures went to war with the Imagination Library. From USA Today:
For the younger kids, it’s largely very simple books about counting and animal noises and colours and simple words. For older kids, the books have themes like friendship and self-reliance and nice little stories I would have loved to have read to my daughter when she was younger—like the one about someone trying to hire a rooster to wake everyone. Most of the books feature animals as their main characters. I didn’t look at all 75 or so books on the list, but among those I reviewed, I didn’t see a single one that dealt with sex—either gay or straight—or genders or anything that seemed likely to offend. Some of them deal with kindness. If that’s too woke for you, I’m not certain you can be helped. A few are bilingual, which I guess could send the Hispanic haters into a tizzy.
Her voice soared above poverty and heartbreak and simple, flawed humanity. Her kindness floated to a place above the noise and petty squabbling of our grubby, competitive culture. As she herself wrote:
There were rags of many colours, and every piece was small
And I didn’t have a coat, and it was way down in the fall
Mama sewed the rags together, sewing every piece with love
She made my coat of many colours that I was so proud of
So were we.
Sail on, Ms Dolly.
