I could have scripted the reactions I got when I told folks around the office yesterday that Dolly Parton had died.
There were gasps. Hands went immediately over faces and over hearts. You didn’t need to know already that someone was a fan to feel pretty safe guessing that the news would hit hard.
That’s the particular kind of legendary status Dolly enjoyed before she died at the age of 80. While the world knew that she’d been dealing with cancer in recent months, she shared as recently as Friday: “I still have so many things I want to achieve, so I’m gonna keep working as long as I can to see everything come to life.” As several colleagues said to me yesterday, “she’s the kind of person I just thought would live forever.”
As we all buzzed with the news, one colleague reminded me that I’d written about Dolly in the pages of America before. During my O’Hare fellowship, the three of us fellows collaborated on a piece at the end of 2020 that highlighted the music that had gotten us through that difficult year. Dolly was one of my picks.
I gained a new appreciation for Dolly during the Covid-19 pandemic. From that 2020 piece:
It was this year…that I came to appreciate [Dolly] as more than a big blonde hairdo and some Southern charm, more even than her 60-plus-year career. This was the year that Dolly Parton saved the world.
Dolly made a $1 million donation that year in honor of a Vanderbilt University Medical Center physician, and her generosity helped fund the Moderna vaccine. It was a significant step toward reaching post-pandemic life, keeping people safe from the effects of the virus and allowing them to return to their jobs and the best parts of life outside and in community.
This only tells one bit of the story of Dolly the humanitarian. In 1995, she founded the Imagination Library, a book-gifting program that has sent hundreds of millions of free books to children nationwide. She was a proud Tennessean who supported her home state by fighting to reduce its high school dropout rate and providing relief in the wake of disasters like Hurricane Helene in 2024 and the Great Smoky Mountains wildfires in 2016. She is often cited as someone whose philanthropy kept her from billionaire status, a consequence of her own design. While Parton never said precisely as much, she told Adam Grant on his “Work Life” podcast, “I always count my blessings more than I count my money.”
Dolly spoke about her Christian faith clearly and often. She was born in 1946 in rural Tennessee near the Smoky Mountains and grew up in a large family with 11 siblings. Dolly shared openly about experiencing poverty at a young age. She was raised in a Pentecostal church where her grandfather served as pastor. It was in church where she first explored her musical gifts and began to see the path that would guide her to glorify God in her own particular way.
She passed the language of faith on to her family. In the statement announcing her death on Instagram yesterday, her nephew Bryan Seaver said his aunt “lived in the light and is in the arms of Jesus.”
Dolly resisted caricature at every turn, no matter how much society tried to impose it upon her. She managed to be both playful and deep, both funny and soulful, both oh-so-specific and broadly appealing. She was an unmistakable icon; her look and sound cemented her as a true original, often to be imitated but never to be perfectly copied or captured by anyone else. Topping her long list of accomplishments, she achieved the next-to-impossible: She was appreciated both as a persona and as a person.
And we haven’t even talked about the songs yet.
It’s not by mistake that Dolly is one of the best-selling music artists of all time. She spent her long career as a hitmaker, both as a performer and as a songwriter. She is as consequential for that soaring voice and rhinestone guitar as she is for writing hits for other artists, perhaps most notably Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You.” When The New York Times released its list of the 30 greatest American songwriters earlier this year, Lindsay Zoladz wrote of Dolly’s style: “Even at its glitziest…there is always an earnest purity about Parton’s work and worldview….Artifice and authenticity, Parton reminds us in her own down-home, high-femme way, are not mutually exclusive.”
She released her first solo studio album in 1967 at the age of 21. Since then, she has recorded 48 more solo albums and collaborated on soundtracks and live albums. She was inducted as a member of the Grand Ole Opry in 1969 and last performed at the venue in a celebration of her 50th anniversary of membership. Dolly set the stage for artists to come, proving that the country tunes she penned had popular resonance and that a songwriter could become a superstar.
I love many, many, many of Dolly’s songs. But one in particular means the most to me.
Dolly released “Islands in the Stream” with Kenny Rogers in 1983. It’s a sweet duet about enduring love that lasts through changes and challenges. It’s catchy and hummable. When I hear it, I’m brought back to the kitchen at my Nana’s house, where one summer my aunt and uncle played the song for me for the first time.
After a great meal and a few glasses of wine, it turned into the kind of family dance party where kitchen utensils were used as microphones and one relative, particularly moved, cried out, “Dolly is the real talent.”
Since that summer, the song has been a family anthem on many happy days. I remember driving to pick my sister up from her freshman year of college and seeing her face light up when I rolled down the window and she heard Dolly and Kenny crooning from the car radio. I remember the song being a huge hit during the parents’ weekend football tailgate during my senior year at Boston College. And whenever I’m having a bad day, I revisit the video of my whole family dancing to “Islands in the Stream” together at my wedding last year. I never get tired of seeing cousins twirl uncles, aunts laugh with in-laws and friends get pulled into the family circle.
The song reminds me that Dolly isn’t just the soundtrack to our lives because we enjoy listening to her. It’s because she makes people who don’t usually dance get up and move their feet. She makes people who don’t usually sing belt it out. She brings people of all ages together, allowing one generation to help another fall in love with songs that were written and sung long before they were born.
I shared my admiration of Dolly, especially since the days of her pandemic heroism, with my Nana, who died earlier this month. She and Dolly were about the same age. They both lost their lives to cancer. And to me, they were both larger than life, more expansive than time, quicker and wittier than the best comedians.
In the weeks since my grandmother’s passing, loving people have reminded me that she enjoys her rest now, with God and with the family and friends who have gone before her. I admit it has been difficult for me to wrap my mind around that comfort, since my Nana is now separated from her four children and 10 grandchildren, to whom I watched her devote everything these last 28 years, and from many friends with whom she shared many joyful memories.
Today I imagine Nana meeting Dolly Parton. And I’m starting to get the picture.
Two women who spent their lives caring for children and vulnerable people, and who only became more committed to those efforts with age. Who developed a signature style and sense of humor, who cultivated their unique talents and practiced tirelessly to keep getting better at them.
I’ll never be able to let my Nana go. But Dolly is reminding me that without the two of them, without their singularity and gifts, the heavenly banquet is incomplete.
I guess this is what John’s Gospel means when Jesus talks about a place being prepared for us in his father’s house. There is a part of the communion of saints that my Nana and Dolly (and all of us?) were meant to fill. Their place was designed and perfected by God. When they fill it, God’s home is just as it was meant to be.
Today heaven is more musical. Today heaven is more generous. Today heaven is like a family reunion. They helped to make it that way.
Rest in peace, Dolly. May you smile with pride at the legendary status you earned, and may you enjoy the meet-and-greet with our many loved ones who loved you, too.
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