When I was small, I thought Dolly Parton was a bit ridiculous. The hair that seemed to defy weather and physics. The rhinestones. The whole enormous, glittering package of her. I was a kid in Ontario watching a woman from Tennessee on a television screen, and I did not have the equipment yet to understand what I was looking at.
What I did understand was the smile. It went right through the screen. And the dimples — I had those too, and I remember deciding, with the deep seriousness of a child, that this meant something. That we had a thing in common. Hers were considerably better than mine, but I stand by the observation.
Dolly died on August 25th, at 80. In the days since, I have not been able to stop reading what people are writing about her.
Why does everyone have a Dolly story?
That’s the part that has struck me most. It isn’t just the famous people and the tributes from other musicians. It’s everybody. People who met her once for four seconds. People who never met her at all but had a grandmother who loved her. Parents whose kids got free books in the mail every month for years because she decided, back in 1995, that children should have books whether or not their families could buy them.
There are millions of those book kids now. Most of them will never connect the dog-eared paperback on their shelf to the woman in the rhinestones. That was rather the point.
Did she know what she meant to people?
This is the question I keep coming back to, and I don’t think it’s really a question about Dolly. I think it’s a question about all of us.
Most people don’t know. We move through our lives having no clear idea what we’ve meant to the people around us — the offhand thing you said that someone carried for twenty years, the afternoon you showed up when nobody asked you to. We find out at funerals, which is a terrible design flaw. Or we don’t find out at all.
But with Dolly, I think the answer is actually yes. I think she knew. Not out of vanity — she was famously funny about herself, and seemed to find the whole spectacle a bit of a joke she was in on. I think she knew because it was deliberate. The books, the wages at her park, the money she quietly moved toward things that mattered to her. She wasn’t accidentally meaningful. She was aiming.
What would it take to be that honest with yourself?
Here’s the part that sits with me now, in a second career, still learning.
Dolly was completely, unmistakably herself in public for sixty years. Not a curated version. Not a strategy. She decided early what she was and then simply was it, loudly, in front of everyone, and let people make of it what they would. Honest, bold, brave, direct — and somehow, through all of it, so cleverly positive. She could disarm almost anyone without ever pretending to be smaller than she was.
I wish I had understood that earlier. I spent a lot of years being careful. Making myself easier to take. Waiting until I was more qualified, more ready, more something, before I said the thing I actually thought.
I’m better at it now than I was. Not as good at it as she was — nobody is. But I notice, more and more, that the people who make a real difference in other people’s lives are almost never the polished ones. They’re the ones who are recognizably, stubbornly themselves.
I hope you have someone like that in your life. And I hope, on the days it feels risky, you let yourself be that person for somebody else.
Thank you, Dolly.