The World Needed Dolly Parton
I met Dolly Parton as a kid in Kings Mountain.
There was an outdoor music park in the Oak Grove community just outside of town, and Dolly performed there long before she was famous. I am not even sure she was the headline act that night. Our meeting was brief, and I might have gotten her autograph, but it is long gone now.
Years later, the first man I dated was a huge Dolly fan. I am glad he also got to meet her one day. He nearly fainted when she walked up.
Dolly Parton was about as good a human being as has ever lived, and that is not much of an exaggeration.
Heather Cox Richardson wrote a long and moving tribute to Dolly this morning. What I share here is just a small part of what Dolly achieved. If you get Richardson’s newsletter, I recommend reading the whole piece.
In 1986, Dolly bought part of a small Tennessee theme park and turned it into Dollywood. Now, it is the state’s biggest ticketed attraction, bringing in about four million visitors each year and giving jobs to around 4,000 people. She once said that if she ever made it, she wanted to come home and create something that would give back to the people who shaped her.
Two years later, she started the Dollywood Foundation to help education in Sevier County. Its buddy program lowered the high school dropout rate for students in the program from 35 percent to 6 percent. After wildfires hit the county in 2016, the foundation set up the My People Fund and gave over $12 million to families who lost their homes.
In 2020, Dolly gave $1 million to Vanderbilt University Medical Center for research that showed how well mRNA vaccine technology works. This research helped lead to Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine, which saved millions of lives. Dolly later got her own vaccine on camera, wearing a dress with cut-out shoulders so the doctor could give her the shot easily. Even public health seemed brighter with Dolly’s style.
Starting in 2022, the Grow U program covered full tuition, fees, and books for about 11,000 employees at 25 amusement parks and attractions run by Herschend Enterprises. Dolly believed that people should always keep learning and growing.
Her biggest legacy might be the Imagination Library, which she started in 1995 to send books to every young child in Sevier County. She was inspired by her father, who she said was the smartest man she ever knew, but who could not read and missed out on many chances because of it.
The program eventually expanded across the United States, Australia, Canada, Ireland, and the United Kingdom. In 2018, Dolly donated its 100 millionth book to the Library of Congress, a copy of her own Coat of Many Colors dedicated to her father. By the time of her death, the Imagination Library had delivered more than 332 million books to over three million children.
When children finish the program, they get a final letter that encourages them to dream big, learn as much as they can, care for others, and remember that they can become anything. She signs it, of course, “I Will Always Love You.”
She truly loved people, without limits. That included LGBTQ people, even when some of her conservative fans criticized her. Dolly never held back or put conditions on her love. She stood by people who were often told they did not belong.
Dolly Parton changed millions of lives with her music, but also by creating jobs, supporting education, helping with disaster relief, funding medical research, giving opportunities, sending books, and always insisting that everyone deserved dignity.
The world needs more people like Dolly Parton. Most of us will not write songs that last for generations or create something that gives millions of books to children. But we can still follow her example. We can remember our roots, use our success to help others, and never hold back our love.
Just remember my favorite quote from Jana Stanfield, “I can’t do all the good the world needs, but the world needs all the good I can do.” Dolly certainly lived that out. She dreamed big, did good, and never lost sight of her people.
She was one of a kind. I am grateful that, for one brief moment in a little music park outside Kings Mountain, my path crossed hers.
