Like many long-lived celebrities, Dolly Parton went through several stages in public perception. She was once a “girl singer” for Porter Wagoner, then a country artist in her own right, then a pop star and sex symbol, and a sometime movie star. Her look was at different times considered chic, or cheap, or even camp. There have been a lot of jokes over the years. But in the last decade, she has been seen as a somewhat saintly figure and a person worthy of study. There are university history classes about her.
There will only ever be one Dolly Parton. But there are many ways to look at her legacy and her relationship to our country and its culture. And there are many things we can learn from her life.
One way of looking at Dolly Parton is through the lens of the American Dream, which she certainly achieved. She was born in rural Tennessee in 1946. Her father was a hard-working, illiterate sharecropper and the family lived in a one-room cabin. She had eleven siblings. Her song “Coat of Many Colors,” was based on her real-life experience of being so poor that she had a coat of rags sewn together one winter by her mother. As she sang, others teased her, “But they didn’t understand it, and I tried to make them see / One is only poor, only if they choose to be / Now I know we had no money, but I was rich as I could be / In my coat of many colors my momma made for me.”
She learned to play the guitar and started singing on the radio as a child. She made her way to Nashville and was successfully writing songs for others by the mid-1960s. Her first label failed to turn her into a pop star. She got her big break on the Porter Wagoner Show. Then, defying expectations, she went solo. Between then and the end of her career, she soared on country and pop charts. She was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Twenty-six of her songs reached number one on Billboard and she had 11 Grammies, wrote more than 3,000 songs, and sold more than 100 million records. She appeared on television and starred in movies. She wrote musicals. She opened a theme park, called Dollywood. When she died, her net worth was estimated at over $650 million.
Dolly Parton was most definitely an American success story. Her life could have been written by Horatio Alger Jr. She was born poor and she died rich. Publicly, she was always chipper and gracious and generous. She was a hard worker. She knew about licensing and sales and merchandizing. She had a keen eye for profit. She was a testament to the ability of genius to rise in America and to the potential for success in a capitalist country.
Another way of looking at Dolly Parton is through the lens of virtue. If you still think Dolly Parton is defined by rhinestones or her silhouette or a handful of songs, you haven’t been paying attention. Dolly Parton has been appreciated as a model of virtue for a while now. In 2022, Mary Townsend wrote an essay titled “Dolly Parton is Magnificent” for Plough. As Townsend explains, “On the surface, her grand and rhinestone-laden mode of showmanship is almost inexplicable – until you start to notice that almost everyone seems to admire it. On occasion, some do find the eye-catchingly artificial aspect of Dolly off-putting, or the nostalgic orientation of country in general to be not to their taste. But more often, people who have no commitment to country, and know only a single one of her songs (“Jolene”), like the college students in my ethics classes do, are impressed with her persona in a way that radiates outward through the culture at large.” Townsend turns to Aristotle and the concept of kalos to explain what makes Parton so appealing, for so many people. Townsend says: “Kalos describes something that is good but also lovely, perfectly beautiful while astonishingly good, the kind of thing to aim for in word and deed that would never be boring, tired, or pedestrian; never merely a duty but always a pleasure.”
Parton’s life is widely admired. She was remarkably generous. She began the Imagination Library in 1995, sending free books to children (of any income) up to age five in the Tennessee county where she grew up. The program went national, then international. When the program won the David M. Rubenstein prize from the Library of Congress in 2021, it had distributed over 160 million books. This literacy program was a direct response to her father’s own illiteracy. In 2020, Parton donated a million dollars to help Moderna create a COVID vaccine. These were some good deeds among many. She has given to children’s hospitals, helped send Tennesseans to college, helped preserve bald eagles, and many more things.
Parton also had a generosity of spirit. When she was Porter Wagoner’s “girl singer,” Wagoner expected that to be who she was for a long time. He also expected to manage her career indefinitely. He was very angry when she went solo, angry enough to badmouth her and to sue to gain a percentage of her earnings. Despite all that, when he was in financial trouble years later, she bought his musical catalogue so he could pay his bills. When he recovered financially and wanted to buy it back, she gave it back. And when he was on his deathbed, she was there to comfort him. (This is explained well in a profanity-laden episode of Drunk History.) She was magnanimous.
Parton was a model of filial piety. Despite not always making choices her parents admired in her youth, she never severed ties with her family. When she climbed the heights, she took her family with her. She never hid them away. A clip online shows her singing “In the Pines” on her variety show in the 1970s, with both of her parents and a half dozen siblings. At any of her concerts, some of the other musicians on stage were her relatives. Over the years, she employed dozens, even generations, of relatives. She helped raise some of her siblings. Unable to have children of her own, she was aunt and grandmother to many. This all comes through in the video and statement released by her family. Few other celebrities remained so closely connected to their family circle and did so much to share their success.
Despite all her achievements, another of her virtues was humility. In 2021, when some Tennessee lawmakers wanted to put a statue of her in the state legislature, she asked them to withdraw the bill. There is a statue of her in her hometown, but she did not believe she needed to be enshrined in the state legislature. In 2022, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame wanted to induct her and she resisted, because she did not believe she had really achieved anything in rock music. When they persisted, she insisted on writing some rock music, to better merit the honor. She enjoyed being up on stage, but she did not believe that she always belonged at center stage.
With her legendary story and personality, in recent years we have sometimes forgotten to view her through the lens of musical genius. She didn’t earn her spot on the charts through her hair or her outfits or even her sense of humor. She was endlessly creative. She began writing songs when she was five. She was performing on television at ten, before her family owned a television set. There are the 3,000 songs we know, but there are hundreds, maybe thousands more to come. She left behind a vault of unreleased, pre-recorded music, with plans for its release and use by other artists. She excelled in multiple genres. In Ken Burns’s Country Music, Brenda Lee emphasizes that Dolly Parton is not just country, or pop, or rock, and says, “everybody from every genre loves her.” It’s telling that Rolling Stone put out a list of Dolly Parton’s 50 best songs, not 10 or 15. And while we know her best for her voice, she played multiple instruments, including the autoharp, banjo, dulcimer, and guitar, among others.
Songs just seemed to flow out of her. She often drew on her own life, as with “Coat of Many Colors.” Her songs “My Tennessee Mountain Home” and “Wildflowers” reflected her own experiences. But she could capture experiences shared by many people, as she did with “Jolene” or “9 to 5.” Like other great artists of the past, she was always open to inspiration. She did not write “Jolene” and “I Will Always Love You” on the same day—as rumor held—but she did write them close together. She exercised the kind of imagination as perception that Mark Vernon ascribes to William Blake. She wrote songs that other people sang and made famous, like “There’ll Always Be Music” sung by Tina Turner or “Rainbowland” by Miley Cyrus (her goddaughter). There must have been many other songwriters who looked at her the way that Salieri looked at Mozart, amazed and envious.
We can also look at Dolly Parton as a model citizen. In our polarized times, people have recognized that somehow everyone seems to like Dolly Parton. In fact, in 2019, Jad Abumrad and Shuma Oliaee made a podcast about this, Dolly Parton’s America. They wondered what it was about her that made her agreeable to almost everyone and how we might learn from that. One aspect was certainly her restraint and unwillingness to make political statements or to easily take offense. Though she certainly wore more sequins than George Washington, she kept many of her opinions to herself as he did, and her private life was so private that her husband’s face was unknown to the public despite their fifty-nine-year marriage. But people did not just love her because she kept things back, people of all stripes felt that she had common cause with them. And you could see people of all stripes at her concerts.
Dolly Parton was internationally famous and nationally beloved, but she was always tethered to where she was from. She was a model citizen in her commitment to her home place, Sevier County, Tennessee. She began her Imagination Library in her home county. Over the years, she incentivized high school graduation there and gave out college scholarships. She helped raise money for the local hospital. She donated money after natural disasters and organized fundraisers. Since 2022, Dollywood employees have their further education covered by their employer. Her charity extended across Tennessee, but it always began in Sevier County. She never left the Smoky Mountains behind.
Somewhere someone is writing a piece explaining why Dolly Parton was not perfect and why many Americans are going too far in their idolization of her. Certainly no one is perfect and all human idols have feet of clay, but some people can still be exemplars. Dolly Parton pointed to what is possible, defying expectations and the excuses we often make for our own shortcomings. She is an example of human genius and generosity. In polarized times, she showed that it is still possible to be yourself without being polarizing. She showed that one can achieve success and enjoy it well and share it with family and community. It is possible to work hard and love what you do. It is possible to be a good citizen in your local and your national community. On Twitter, Miles Smith noted that the outpouring of grief over the loss of Dolly “is Appalachia’s version of the death of Queen Elizabeth.” Respectfully, that parallel may begin in Appalachia, but it extends to all of America. Dolly Parton achieved many things in her life, but one of her achievements was to become a national role model. Her legacy will continue, but her absence will be widely felt.
Image Credit: The New Yorker
