As soon as I saw on Facebook that “the wrong 80-year-old died” and looked to see who it was, I’ve been reading and listening to everything I can about Dolly Parton. I’ve always been an admirer from afar, but this week has been a delight in realizing just how extraordinary she was.
Dolly had integrity. She stuck to her values. After George Floyd was murdered in 2020, she said, “of course Black lives matter. Do we think our little white asses are the only ones that matter? No!” [1] She was a huge supporter of LGBT and transgender rights. [2] And of course, with “9 to 5,” supported women’s rights as well. She also supported countless other musicians, singing with everyone from Myley Cyrus to Ladysmith Black Mambazo to Keke Palmer to Smokey Robinson to Sting and on and on.
In other words, she had an expanded view of family. She was an expert at seeing the good in people. As she said in a 2020 podcast interview with Brene Brown,
I try to find that little God light in everybody, and I know that it is in there, some people let it shine more than others. A lot of people don’t even know they have it, unless somebody can, with enough love or reaching out, kinda help shine it up a little bit. And even if your pilot light is going out, that can be ignited too. You can kinda get that back, and if you got enough of somebody caring. But you’re right, I really give people the benefit of the doubt. I just love people. I just love people. ~ Dolly Parton [3]
Dolly was an incredible businesswoman – in 1974, she reached the top of the Billboard charts with her song, “I Will Always Love You,” which she wrote when she left a business partnership with longtime collaborator, Porter Wagoner. Elvis Presley wanted to cover it. Dolly was thrilled. She was 28 years old. But Elvis’ manager, Col. Tom Parker, said that Elvis wouldn’t record anything without getting at least half of the publishing rights. She said she cried all night, but she had to keep the copyright. So, heartbroken, Dolly turned them down. (Later, Priscilla told her that Elvis sang the song to her on the court steps when they got divorced!)
What foresight! When Whitney Houston recorded “I Will Always Love You” in 1992 for The Bodyguard, it went platinum and made over $10 million. Dolly used some of the funds to purchase an office complex in a black neighborhood in Nashville, calling it “The House That Whitney Built.” [4]
Dolly was a put her money where her heart was. Starting in 2016, she gave $1,000 a month for 6 months to 900 families in her home county of Seviere County, Tennessee after wildfires destroyed their homes, . In April 2020, she gave $1 million to Vanderbilt University which played a crucial role in the early development of the Covid vaccine. (Later, she gave Vanderbilt another $1 million for their Children’s Hospital in honor of her niece, who was treated there.) When her Dollywood Foundation started giving $500 to Seviere County residents when they graduated from high school, the dropout rate dropped from 35% to 6%. Dollywood employees get 100% tuition, books and fees paid when they go to college. But the most important and far reaching is the Imagination Library, a tribute to her father, Robert Lee Parton, who she describes as one of the smartest men she’d ever met, but who never learned to read or write. Started in 1995, the Library sends free books to children from birth to age 5. Although it started locally, it now operates internationally. They’ve sent over 300 million books to over 3 million children.
All of this makes me admire Dolly so much. Then I came across this Facebook post by a writer named Brian Mann, who explains why the death of someone like Dolly Parton feels so intimate.
I’ve been thinking about why we sometimes grieve people we never knew personally.
Dolly Parton. Jimmy Carter. Fred Rogers.
When we lose people like this, the grief can feel strangely personal. It might seem odd, because most of us never sat across a table from them. They didn’t know our names.
And yet somehow, we felt like we knew something about them, because they each embodied remarkably similar qualities.
They were magnetic without seeming to need attention, secure enough in themselves to be humble, serious about the problems of ordinary people without becoming cynical about the world.
They each had the rare ability to make you feel that there was enough to go around: enough dignity, kindness, grace, enough room at the table.
Fred Rogers could look into a television camera and somehow convince a child that what they felt mattered.
Jimmy Carter could leave the presidency and spend the next four decades demonstrating that significance and status were not the same thing.
Dolly Parton could be larger than life and still make the person standing in front of her feel like the important one.
They didn’t use their presence to make themselves bigger. They used it to make other people feel more human. Their attention communicated something very liberating: I see you. You belong here.…
And maybe the best way to grieve someone like that is not simply to miss them, but to become more like what we loved in them.
~ Brian Mann [5]
I see you. I accept you. I accept me. You belong here. … Let’s keep finding that little God light in each other, and help other people feel more human. We need each other now more than ever.