And Then There Was Dolly

I have long had this assertion that, at any given time, there is one famous person everyone just sort of agrees is a genuinely good person.

For a long time, for me, it was Mr. Rogers. There was something comforting about Fred Rogers simply existing in the world. He seemed kind, gentle, and fundamentally decent. When he died, it felt like we had lost one of the good ones.

Then, eventually, that person became Betty White. She was funny, warm, irreverent, and somehow managed to remain beloved across generations. When Betty died, just a few weeks shy of her 100th birthday, it genuinely felt like the world had lost something.

And then there was Dolly.

Dolly Parton came from almost nothing. She was born into a poor family in the mountains of East Tennessee, one of twelve children packed into a tiny home. She took that beginning and somehow turned it into one of the most extraordinary careers in American entertainment.

But simply saying that she became successful doesn’t really capture what Dolly did.

She became Dolly Parton.

She entered a male-dominated industry and became her own woman within it. She was fearless, defiant, funny, shrewd, and far smarter than anyone foolish enough to underestimate the blonde woman with the enormous hair and rhinestones. She built a career on her own terms and created an image so completely her own that eventually she stopped looking like someone following a fashion and started looking like a category unto herself.

Behind all the wigs, makeup, sequins, and jokes, though, there was an extraordinary songwriter.

Dolly sang her heart out. She gave us glimpses of poverty and childhood, heartbreak and ambition, love and loss. She could write something as devastatingly tender as “I Will Always Love You” and then turn around and tell Jolene, in no uncertain terms, to please stop coming for her man.

There was always a real woman underneath all that carefully constructed Dolly-ness.

And maybe that’s part of why people loved her so much. Dolly was in on the joke. She knew exactly what people saw when they looked at her. She exaggerated it, laughed about it, and then used it to her advantage. There was something wonderfully defiant about that. You couldn’t make fun of Dolly Parton for being Dolly Parton because nobody was better at it than she was.

In 1995, she started the Imagination Library, initially sending free books to young children in the Tennessee county where she grew up. She created it in honor of her father, who couldn’t read or write. That little program eventually grew beyond Tennessee, then beyond the United States, putting hundreds of millions of books into the hands of children around the world.

When the COVID-19 pandemic arrived, Dolly donated $1 million to research at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Some of that funding supported work that helped lead to the Moderna vaccine.

Because of course Dolly Parton helped fund a vaccine.

She became enormously wealthy and famous, but she never seemed to forget the little girl who grew up poor in the mountains of Tennessee. She understood what it meant to need something, and when she had the means to provide it for somebody else, she did.

That’s a legacy considerably larger than a collection of hit records.

Dolly Parton was an icon. She was a trailblazer. She was a songwriter, singer, actress, businesswoman, and philanthropist. She was unapologetically feminine in an industry where men held most of the power, and she proved that kindness and strength were never mutually exclusive.

She was also, somehow, just Dolly.

Today, Dolly Parton died at the age of 80, and I’m left thinking again about that strange little theory I’ve carried around for years. Mr. Rogers. Betty White. Dolly Parton. Those people who seem to occupy a little piece of our culture where, despite everything else we disagree about, we can look at one another and say, Yeah. She’s one of the good ones.

Today, that space is empty again.

The world is a lesser place without her in it.

Rest in peace, Dolly. There will never be another one like you.