Dolly Parton’s generosity sparkling example of genuine goodness

When I saw Dolly Parton perform in Winnipeg in September 2016, I tried, like many people, to take photos.

She shimmered. She glowed. She defied iPhone photography. In everyone’s snaps from the show, she would appear, always, as a column of light, confirming what we all say about Dolly Parton: she is an angel among us.

Parton died on Tuesday at the age of 80. The tributes are pouring out steadily for the country music icon, actor, philanthropist and business mogul. There’s so very much to love about Dolly, that angel from Tennessee.

Obviously, she was a once-in-a-generation singer-songwriter who could both write the enduring classics Jolene and I Will Always Love You on the same day in 1973, as she believed, but also hammer out Shortnin’ Bread on her acrylic nails with Patti LaBelle.

She was an actress with killer comedic timing and an artist in all ways, from her creative output to her fashion to everything else she touched.

But for childfree gals like me, Dolly Parton was also a singular example of what a woman could be beyond motherhood, and how many ways one can be the village.

Parton never had children of her own with her husband Carl Dean, whom she married in 1966 and was married to until his death last year.

“I didn’t have children because I believed that God didn’t mean for me to have kids so everybody’s kids could be mine,” she told Oprah Winfrey in 2020 because, yes, she was still asked that question, even in her 70s.

No one would say Dolly Parton was selfish. No one would say she didn’t have a family. No one would say she “didn’t understand what real love is” or any other things people like to say to childfree people.

She knew, keenly, what it meant to be part of a community, part of a society. There isn’t space to include all that she did and gave and stood for, all the ways she actively made the world better for everyone, but especially children.

She leaned into being Aunt Granny to her nieces and nephews and their children, but she also gave generations of kids the gift of literacy via her Imagination Library, a program that mails free books to children from birth until they begin school, because she watched her parents struggle with illiteracy.

In the early 1990s, she wanted to do something about the high school dropout rates in her home county of Sevier County, Tenn., pledging to give seventh- and eighth-graders US$500 if they graduated from high school, but each student had to pick an accountability buddy on whom the cash was contingent. The county’s high school dropout rate dropped to six per cent from 35 per cent.

When her beloved Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee were devastated by wildfires in 2016, Parton gave eligible Sevier County families $1,000 per month for six months.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, she donated $1 million to the Vanderbilt University Medical Center to help fund research for the Moderna vaccine and encouraged people to get vaccinated.

That year, she also read picture books Thursday nights on YouTube for 10 weeks to comfort kids whose lives became scary and small.

Parton often joked about looking fake, but she was so very real. She was always herself on purpose, to paraphrase one of her famous one-liners. She blazed trails and opened doors and inspired women to pour themselves a cup of ambition. She showed women that it was OK to forge a different path in life, leading with kindness and humour and empathy.

You don’t need to be famous or rich to be a Dolly kind of villager. She taught us, through example, that all of us have the capacity for generosity and to care about our communities. All of us add value by simply being ourselves. All of us have talents we can share with the world, and all of us can contribute in ways big or small to making the world a little better than how we found it.

Dolly Parton was everything good, and it’s tempting to say the world is a darker place without her in it. But I don’t think she would like that idea at all.

I think she’d want us to be the rhinestones we wish to see in the world, you know? Her light will never die if we don’t let it.

jen.zoratti@winnipegfreepress.com

Jen Zoratti
Columnist

Jen Zoratti is a columnist and feature writer working in the Arts & Life department, as well as the author of the weekly newsletter NEXT. A National Newspaper Award finalist for arts and entertainment writing, Jen is a graduate of the Creative Communications program at RRC Polytech and was a music writer before joining the Free Press in 2013. Read more about Jen.

Every piece of reporting Jen produces is reviewed by an editing team before it is posted online or published in print – part of the Free Press‘s tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press’s history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates.