My mother saw her whole career.
She saw the woman who was a global icon. She saw the woman who brought Nashville to Hollywood. She saw Porter Waggoner’s girl singer become too big for his vision, too big for his show, too big to ever again be constrained. But she also saw a ten year old mountain girl on the Cas Walker show in Knoxville on KBIR, making her television debut in 1956. And she has never not been proud of another East Tennessee hillbilly girl who came to bigger things.
Of course, it’s been a long time since Dolly had one of those hits take over the chart (though I’m sure Spotify and Apple Music’s data centers that handle the PA- section of artists are about to burn to the ground), but she didn’t have to. She had done her music her way, charted her own course to the mainstream, become an icon of second-wave feminism on the silver screen and carved her own face on the Mount Rushmore of Nashville’s greatest songwriters – easily the equal of Tom T, or Hank, or Kris, or the Bryants, or Willie, or… and beyond that, she had parlayed her wealth into an even greater fortune – enough to just do whatever she wanted.
And what she wanted to do was…whatever she wanted. She put a theme park in East Tennessee, she took her royalties from Whitney’s cover of “I Will Always Love You” and turned it into support for Nashville’s Black community, she launched her own basic income program for forest fire victims, she quietly invested in and became an uncredited co-producer of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, she sent out a third of a BILLION books to kids between the ages of 0 and 5 so they could learn to read as her father never did. She amassed an engine of tremendous fortune and then spent her life emptying the money cannon at the deserving. You can hardly throw a rock in Tennessee without hitting a majority-Black school whose band uniforms or choir robes hadn’t been paid for, on the low, straight cash, by the little old white girl from Sevier County High.
And of course, there’s the million dollars she gave to a research team at Vanderbilt University, desperate to know what she could do to help, and her funding spearheaded Vanderbilt’s contribution to what became the Moderna virus. A million Americans were killed by COVID, which people have already forgotten, and the reason it’s treatable and less lethal and people mostly don’t get it and survive if they do, five years later, is in part because of the girl from Pittman Center. She underwrote a miracle.
We all loved Dolly, and I don’t say that idly; the response on Blacksky has been a plaintive a “NOOOOOOO” as anywhere else, it’s the first item on the world news in Ireland and London, the most hated man in the word actually gave an appropriate response, she was the least probematic white woman alive in the 21st Century. The queen of Appalachia, the willing icon of drag queens the world around, the one single musical artist that literally everyone I’ve ever known would ride for. In the end, I think we loved her because she was what we wished everyone was: solemn but sassy, talented but humble, self-depricating and silly yet fully aware of her worth and her truth, tremendously kind and surpassingly generous, always ready to bless your heart and hug your neck with empathy and sincerity. The website for her Imagination Library is crashing constantly tonight as people pay tribute by pairing their generosity with hers, because Dolly was someone who made you want to be a better person in the ways she was.
A person of divine gifts, who used them to make the world a better place, and was an exemplar of what the Bible demanded of us all: kindness, justice, walk humbly with your God. I know it will be 2076 before it could even be considered, but if we start venerating now, it’ll make the case easier for our grandchildren.
“O God, whose mercies cannot be numbered: Accept our prayers on behalf of thy servant Dolly Rebecca Parton, and grant her an entrance into the land of light and joy, in the fellowship of thy saints; through Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God. Amen.”
– Conrad Elliot