Living on Earth with Dolly Parton

The year my now six-year-old was one, I played Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” on Spotify 129 times. I’m sure my wife played it just as frequently, so let’s say we enjoyed a good 250 listens at minimum. The reason: a tiny child who had only just gained the language to say “Joling! Joling! Joling!” whenever the music stopped. When Dolly sang “There’s nothing I can do to keep / From crying when he calls your name, Jolene,” our kid in her car seat would make a little fake crying sound, to show she really got it.    

I don’t know how Dolly got so braided into our lives. I grew up to a soundtrack of my dad’s ’60s rock, Motown, and jazz, as well as new Paul Simon, U2, Tom Petty, and Bonnie Raitt albums of the ’80s. Country music didn’t really figure. When I stumbled on “9 to 5” and “Two Doors Down” as a kid and listened to them enough to mention them to my parents, they were noncommittal. Dolly Parton was something of a camp cliché at the time, in a way that eluded my family. 

It took me a couple more decades to get seriously into her catalog. But by then, somehow, Dolly was infused into my life everywhere. There was the time an ex put that gorgeous trio of “Those Memories of You” on a mix tape and sent it to me in a little cardboard cassette mailer. Watching “9 to 5” in my twenties and the subversiveness of three very different grown women laughing hysterically as they passed around a joint after work, and then achieved workplace reforms that nearly fifty years later still remain fiction for most Americans. The angelic Dolly topper on a friend’s Christmas tree. And, to my everlasting gratitude, a music-editor colleague offering me a ticket to see Dolly in 2016 at the Wang Theatre in Boston.

That night, seemingly lit from within in a snow-white bell-bottomed outfit, she played instrument after instrument with ease, sang with the same astonishing range and expressiveness you hear on her records, and told jokes and stories with what sounded like warm spontaneity—although, a musician friend told me, she would hit precisely the same beats, with equal professionalism, the next night and the next. She put over country and pop and rock and bluegrass, a persuasive sample of what are reportedly more than 3000 songs she wrote. She was 70 years old, and just so good at her job. The crowd around me was white and black, gay and straight, urban hipsters and bikers and county folks from New Hampshire. Dolly was one thing we could all agree on.  

A couple years later, I met the lifelong Dolly Parton fan who would become my wife, and we had a baby who demanded Joling all car ride long. While she was still just one, we took her with her big brothers to Dollywood, Dolly’s amusement park in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. Covid was still rampant and we wore masks indoors to see the original Coat of Many Colors in a glass display case, though we had recently all started to get immunized after Covid vaccines finally arrived, one of them developed with funding from Dolly herself. Butterflies, Dolly’s favorite, flew around the amusement park and perched on the shuttle from the parking lot. I was pregnant with the last of our four kids. Six months later, as we prepared to take home our newborn from the hospital, I would sign paperwork to receive a monthly gift from Dolly’s Imagination Library. Every month, a new children’s book drops through our mail slot. “Is that the lady who sends us the books?” the youngest kid asks, examining Dolly’s photo on the flap. I tell him yes, it is.  

The loss of Dolly Parton this past Tuesday hit me harder than any celebrity death in a long time—the last I had such a reaction to were Prince and David Bowie, analogous musical geniuses and multitalents who both died the same year I saw Dolly perform, and the same year Donald Trump first was elected. “Why are you crying when I’ve been a fan so much longer?” my wife teased me, fairly. 

There’s something particularly painful about losing someone of Dolly’s stature right now, at a moment where we are fighting for all the values she embodied. By all accounts—and more of them are emerging this week than were ever publicly known—Dolly was generous, creative, shrewd, funny, soulful, both self-assured and self-deprecating. She was enormously hard-working – in a PBS documentary released last year, “Dolly Parton: Here I Am,” she describes playing 200 nights in a year while also cranking out dozens of new songs on the tour bus. And this is leaving aside how musically gifted and how beautiful she was, sparkling in her sequins and wigs and high heels, so put together that even her “9 to 5” costars Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin, in that documentary, say that while shooting the film they never saw her anything other than perfectly turned out.

Dolly Parton was someone who came from nothing—except love, she was always quick to point out—to become a global star and philanthropist, making major contributions to childhood literacy, global health, and the economics of her home state, as well as the American songbook and the uplift of millions. She matter-of-factly stood up for LGBTQ people, children, and the working class, all with such a lightness of touch that she never scared anyone else away. As another 80-year-old holds power who is in nearly every way her opposite—petulant, greedy, prejudiced, a con artist apparently intent on subverting every last great American institution—it’s easy to ignore the real blessings of the timeline we are in. One of those is surely to have lived on earth with Dolly, and to have been able to share her with the next generation asking us to read her books, and play her songs, again and again and again.

It’s been a rough week for losses in the arts so far: besides Dolly Parton, the deaths were announced of actor Tim Curry at 80 and dot-centric Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama at 97. But why stop there? The Trump administration has threatened to demolish Washington’s Kennedy Center, currently sitting mostly vacant, unless the president is allowed to overhaul it to his liking and stamp it with his name. Over at the US Embassy in the Dominican Republic, the State Department has graduated from covering up a sumptuous Kahinde Wiley painting to gleefully removing the artwork and trying to sell it. On Instagram, the ambassador cited the painting as an undesirable example of “globalist and woke ideologies,” which as far as I can tell means that it features and/or is created by non-white people. There is a long history of this sort of thing. I suppose we should just be glad Dolly didn’t trigger the censors.

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