Dolly Parton, who died yesterday, performing on tour. Behind the rhinestones was a lifelong union member, a vaccine funder, and a literacy champion who put free books in the hands of millions of children.Christian Behring/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images
Last night, I watched Straight Talk, the 1992 Dolly vehicle in which the singer plays, yes, a straight-talker from Arkansas who, through a series of highly predictable accidents, becomes Chicago’s biggest radio talk-show host, dishing out salty Dollyisms to the city’s brokenhearted.
Giddy with her sudden fame and riches, her character wants to buy champagne for an entire restaurant. “Money’s meant to be spent, right?” she coos to a love interest (James Woods! Of all people.) “What good’s it going to do anybody in the bottom of my panty drawer!”
For the country superstar, who died yesterday at 80, the wisecrack could have been a creed for her own life, one defined by extraordinary generosity and a fierce loyalty to the underdog.
As Covid tore through America, Dolly gave $1 million to Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, which worked with the drug company Moderna to develop its cutting-edge vaccine. “Dolly gets a dose of her own medicine,” she quipped in a tweet accompanying a video of her getting the jab, in which she urged others to follow suit and called those still resisting the shot “chicken squat.” She even sang a reworked version of her megahit “Jolene”:
“Vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, I’m begging of you please don’t hesitate. Vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, ’cause once you’re dead then that’s a bit too late.”
According to the New York Times, Dr. Mark Denison, who led the research, credited Parton’s donation with funding its critical early stages.
For nearly 60 years, Dolly Parton kept up her membership in the Nashville Association of Musicians (AFM Local 257)—a notable commitment in Tennessee, a right-to-work state with one of the nation’s lowest union participation rates.
In a statement posted to social media, the union hailed Parton “as a steadfast champion for working musicians” who filed union contracts “for gigs, sessions, and tours.” It added that “her extensive charitable work was never about public perception—she gave simply because she truly cared, always doing everything the right way to make sure that people were taken care of.”
Much has already been written about Parton’s celebrated Imagination Library, the literacy program she founded in East Tennessee in 1995 that would eventually send hundreds of millions of free books to enrolled children every month. It was inspired by her father, who Parton said could not read or write.
I learned about a lesser-known side of the charity when Dolly visited my home country, Australia, where Imagination Library runs a local partnership: Its strong focus on Indigenous authors and illustrators.
“We’re currently supporting 50,000 children and their families,” Dr. Lyndsey McKee, CEO of United Way, the local operator, told Australia’s ABC News Radio after Parton’s death. Ten percent of the books sent are First Nations titles, and 70 percent are Australian. Children on the program are nine times more likely to be interested in books, McKee said, citing the “absolute joy of reading books.” Adult literacy is improving too, she said, a ripple effect of helping families put reading at the heart of home life.
And Parton didn’t base the library in Sydney or Melbourne. She launched it in 2019 in the regional town of Tamworth—Australia’s country music mecca, our very own Nashville.
“Children are reading and they’re taking it in and the pictures are coming alive and it’s a lifelong skill.”
Lisa Rennie of the Tamworth Imagination Library celebrated Dolly’s impact on young Indigenous readers, a group for whom literacy remains a major challenge, in an interview with Australian broadcaster SBS. One Indigenous boy “pointed to the book and he said he never knew children of his color skin could fly a plane,” Rennie said. “So children are reading and they’re taking it in and the pictures are coming alive and it’s a lifelong skill.”
“That’s a wonderful gift that Dolly has given to us here in Tamworth,” Cheryl Brown, Tamworth Country Music Festival coordinator, told SBS. “And we will certainly endeavor to carry that on forever.”
The program also runs in the UK, Canada, and Ireland.
Dolly used to joke that if she was a man, she’d be a drag queen. In fact, she once entered a lookalike drag competition as herself—and lost. She was an indefatigable defender of her gay fans, guarding against hate and championing the underdog with her trademark compassion.
“They’ve made me the poster child, I think, only because I’m so outspoken as far as being accepting of people in general,” Parton told Larry King, who asked her in 2016 if her support attracted criticism from conservative groups. “I do not believe that we should criticize and judge other people. I think we should be accepting and loving. We are all God’s children. We are who we are, and we should be allowed to be who we are.”
“I got too much to do on my own to do God’s work too,” she added. “We are who we are. If you’re gay you’re gay, if you’re straight you’re straight.”
I’ll let Dolly speak for herself:
