We’ve been wishing for something to unite us, and as always we have forgotten to be careful what we wish for. Today each of us has lost a family member. Dolly Parton has died at age 80, and it’s a measure of the space she leaves behind that no words seem to want to fit in front of her name. I’ve tried a few, too: “Country music superstar” is limiting, “entertainer” doesn’t cut it, “icon” has been rendered meaningless by overuse. She did too many things, at too high a level, with too singular a sensibility, that reached too many people in too personal a way to be reduced to a simple descriptor. “Dolly” will have to do.
Even if you aren’t a superfan, you know the details of her life. You know she was one of what you would probably refer to as “a whole mess o’ kids”—fourth of 12, to be exact—in rural Tennessee. You know they lived in a one-room log cabin, a replica of which can now be found in her theme park Dollywood in nearby Pigeon Forge. You know she started playing guitar and writing songs at age eight and those songs got her on local radio at age 13. You know she went right from high school to Nashville, where she met her husband Carl Dean at a laundromat the day she arrived, and that she got her big break as the new “girl singer” on The Porter Wagoner Show, which she soon outgrew. You know that leaving Porter behind was the basis of “I Will Always Love You,” and maybe she did write that song on the very same day she wrote “Jolene,” or maybe she didn’t, but it doesn’t matter anyway because it’s now up with George Washington chopping down the cherry tree in American lore.
The very first song on her very first album, 1967’s Hello, I’m Dolly, is called “Dumb Blonde,” and although she released an enormous amount of music in the nearly 60 years since—49 studio albums on her own, plus those collaborative albums with Porter, and Kenny Rogers, and as part of Trio with Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris—it’s all right there, album one, side one, track one. That crystal-clear voice with the down-home lilt of a banjo, that crisp enunciation, that strength, and that self-knowledge: “Just ’cause I’m blonde, don’t think I’m dumb / ’Cause this dumb blonde ain’t nobody’s fool.” A little self-deprecating, a little aw-shucks, but seriously: Don’t mess.
Dolly Parton became the queen of country music, but you knew her voice whatever kind of music you grew up listening to. She transcended the genre without ever really trying to cross over; there was no disco phase, no attempt to rough up her voice, no toning down the big wigs. She was never anything less than utterly joyful and sincere in her music and in her interactions with the public, and even the most cynical and irony poisoned of us fell in love. She reached everyone, and that’s because we all came to her.
She also got absolutely crazy rich and did a lot of good with that money. In recent years, she spent a million of her own dollars toward research for the Moderna Covid vaccine, a couple million more for Hurricane Helene relief efforts. She had a sanctuary at Dollywood to preserve the endangered American bald eagle, for Pete’s sake. But her real passion was childhood literacy, in honour of her father, who never learned how to read or write. Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library sent one book a month to kids who enrolled, from the time of their birth up until they started kindergarten. With their final book, these kids also got a letter from Dolly. “You have to promise me you will keep on reading,” she wrote. “Every book is a treasure, and every time you open one, you will meet new friends and take wonderful journeys to magical places.”
Dolly and Carl never did have children of their own. “God didn’t mean for me to have kids so that everybody’s kids could be mine,” she told Oprah Winfrey in 2020. You hear her saying this, don’t you? You know the voice. She used that voice to advocate for marriage equality in the aughts and for the rights of transgender Tennesseans earlier this decade.
The name “Dolly Parton” has come up a couple of times this year, in a couple of contexts I wouldn’t have expected. The first was early this summer, in conversation with the band the Hold Steady. They had just played Riot Fest, where Weird Al had been on the bill, and a backstage conversation had revolved around whether there was any living American more beloved than him. Lead singer Craig Finn said, “Dolly Parton,” and everyone agreed, and that was kind of a conversation ender. After all, who is more universally loved than her? We talked about it onstage at a fan Q&A in Los Angeles and put it to the crowd: Can you name anyone everyone loves more? Nobody could. I’ve thought about it ever since, and I still can’t.
The second was at Darling, Sean Brock’s restaurant and vinyl-listening bar in West Hollywood. A few weeks ago, Brock wanted to put his custom speakers to the test by playing each of Dolly’s first 12 albums, start to finish, in order. I was there, and it is a testament to the perfect acoustics in that room that if you were sitting in the right spot, you felt like you were right there in the studio with her. But it’s a tribute to Dolly that everyone in the room shut up and listened. That voice—familiar, comforting, kind, maternal almost—made a West Hollywood bar crowd be quiet. It’s primal, a memory we all share, whatever kind of home we were born into and whether or not there’s a replica of that home in our own theme parks.
Dolly Parton’s name came up again this morning, when her nephew announced her passing on her Instagram account. Now we’re all hearing her name, everywhere, from just about everyone we know. Dolly was a singular talent, a truly great American, a figure who operated in pure joy, empathy, and sincerity. She became as successful as a human being can be by never holding any of that joy, empathy, and sincerity back.
“There is no limit to what you can do or how far you can go,” Dolly wrote in that letter to kids getting their last book from her Imagination Library. “Just remember the lessons my family taught me: dream big dreams, learn everything you can learn, and care for all those who care for you. You do all of those things and you can be anyone you want to be. You are terrific, and remember: I will always love you.”
Goodbye, Dolly, and thank you. You were terrific.
