I was most fortunate to meet Dolly Parton in Nashville last summer. With apologies to Shakespeare, “death shall not brag she wandered in his shade.” Her uniquely American story will live on.
I attended the workshop for a new musical she had written about her life, and she was there as in her song “Jolene,” with a “smile like a breath of spring” and a “voice soft like summer rain.” That night she was triumphant, magnetic, full of joy, a half-filled Champagne glass in hand (I learned later she didn’t drink).
The musical, Hello, I’m Dolly, is the title of her first album released in 1967. The musical features a score written by Dolly, including some of her biggest hits such as “Jolene” and “I Will Always Love You,” as well as new songs she wrote especially for the stage, and the director is Tony Award-winning director Bart Sher. The show will open on Broadway next year. Given the incredible outpouring for her, since she died at 80 this week, I imagine it will be even more of a hit than it would have been.
Always gracious, she was happy to share the spotlight with Sher. “How lucky I am to have the great Bart Sher direct my Hello, I’m Dolly musical,” she had said. “My heart tells me that Bartlett is the man and the director for the job.”
She added with characteristic graciousness: “When you decide to put your whole life up on stage, you hope and pray to find the right director with the right creativity and sensitivity to present all the blood, sweat, tears, light, love, and laughter that I’ve experienced over seven decades of living.”
Dolly Parton was a woman of faith, hope, prayer, light, love, and laughter. She was to go to Las Vegas from Nashville but canceled the trip because they said she was indisposed—nothing to worry about. At the time, I had a premonition of the worst. I knew that all divas are about to have a cold, have a cold, or are just getting over a cold. But this woman was durable. If she canceled a gig, something had to be wrong.
Ironic that a woman who was so much in your face in her public persona was so secretive about her private life.
Before I became immersed in it in Nashville, I knew little of country and western music. My only knowledge of Dolly was that she was a woman with big bosoms who sang in a tight dress. I laughed at the TV interview she gave to a cub reporter who apologized for having to ask: “Dolly, are they real?”
“I’ll tell you one thing, honey, she replied, they were REAL expensive.”
She had said she modeled her look on the “town tramp”: “It costs a lot of money to look this cheap.”
The woman from Locust Grove in East Tennessee enjoyed laughing about her embonpoint. She told Oprah, “I call these my weapons of mass distraction.” She complained to David Letterman: “Nobody notices I’ve got a great ass too.”
She was born in Sevier County, Tennessee, in a cabin in the Smokies without electricity or running water, the fourth of 12 children who never forgot where she came from. When Marie Claire asked her what she was reading, she answered with John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. She said she identified with “the hard work and the poor people and the struggles and the times.”
She had a husband who predeceased her whom she rarely saw. She lived mostly with another woman, Judy Ogle, a lifelong friend, with whom she denied a romantic relationship. She was a spectacular talent and a tremendous box-office success.
Dolly embodied the American dream. “I had an ambition, and it burned inside of me,” she said. “It was something I knew would take me out of the mountains.”
She was an extraordinary person. She made millions exploiting her God-given talent. She had no children but was an aunt to millions of children through her Imagination Library, which gave books to millions of kids. She might have been a billionaire had she not given most of her money to others in need.
She was a caricature of herself, inventing a Dolly who became iconic, and she played out the hand to the end. She was always in on the joke and supremely confident. To a traumatized generation, symbols are important.
She was a woman of faith, making “a joyful noise unto the Lord,” and she often spoke with conviction about her prayers. In her memory, her close friend Kathie Lee Gifford said on Fox News, “She loved people because she knew God did.”
Parton brought empathy and support to the AIDS crisis. In a conversation with Larry King, the late broadcaster, in 2016, she said she had taken heat for her support for the LGBTQ community, but that she did not believe that we should criticize and judge other people.
In her philanthropy, she didn’t “spray and pray,” but laser-beam targeted, paying sharpest attention to the place she came from. When people lost their homes to wildfires in Sevier County, she provided more than $12 million in immediate financial assistance.
In 1988, she established the Dollywood Foundation to support education in Sevier County. In 1990, her Buddy Program reduced the high school dropout rate in participating classes from 35% to 6%.
No anti-vaxxer, Dolly donated $1 million to Vanderbilt University Medical Center in 2020 to fund research proving that mRNA vaccine technology worked. That research led to grants that enabled the development of the Moderna mRNA vaccine against COVID-19 that saved millions of lives. She also encouraged others to get vaccinated by taking her own shot on camera.
Beginning in February 2022, under the Grow U program, Parton provided 100 percent free tuition, fees, and books to any of the 11,000 employees at any of 25 amusement parks and attractions.
In 1995, she founded Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, putting books into the hands of every young child in Sevier County. The program has grown until it now serves children across the United States, Australia, Canada, Ireland, and the United Kingdom. In February 2018, Parton donated the 100 millionth book from her Imagination Library to the Library of Congress. It was a copy of Coat of Many Colors, dedicated to her father. Her Imagination Library has delivered more than 332 million books to more than three million children.
Millions who didn’t know her mourned her loss. But she knew them. She truly lived out the American dream.
In New York, the top of the Empire State Building lit up pink at 9:25 pm on the evening of her death, a riff on her song 9 to five which she wrote for the movie in which she starred with Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin. The antennas of Chicago’s Willis Tower, formerly the Sears Tower, lit up pink too. So did the Ferris wheel at the Santa Monica Pier, which also sported a giant pink heart. The nation’s bridges were bathed in pink. In Massachusetts, Boston’s Zakim and Longfellow Bridges, Worcester’s Kenneth Burns Memorial Bridge, the Fore River Bridge linking Quincy and Weymouth, and the Charles Braga Memorial Bridge spanning the Taunton River, Milwaukee’s Hoan Bridge, the Dallas skyline’s Reunion Tower, Caesar’s Superdome in New Orleans, and of course Nashville’s KVB Bridge and historic Metro Courthouse wore pink in her memory. At the U.S. Open, the Arthur Ashe Stadium played “Jolene,” the desperate plea of a woman to a beautiful rival not to take my man,
She was beloved around the world, especially in England. At Buckingham Palace, the Band played “9 to 5.”
Much has been said that this may be the last bipartisan outpouring, with Donald Trump and the Democratic Socialists of America both posting tributes to her. Let’s hope not. Our differences shouldn’t constrain our universal capacity to celebrate lives
Her last song is locked in a vault to be opened on her 100th birthday, in 2046, and has to do with her place in history. I’m older than Parton and wish I could live to hear it.
Her “eternal summer shall not fade.” Dolly, we will always love you.
