God keeps taking the wrong 80-year-olds from us.
That was my first thought when I saw the news this afternoon. It’s a selfish thought, I admit. I’m at peace with being selfish about this.
Every day of my life, Dolly Parton was somewhere on this earth strumming guitars with her acrylic nails, talking up the beauty of humanity, being honest about our frailties and shortcomings, asking solely through her music if we all couldn’t be better to ourselves and each other.
Here’s what I think needs to be said about Dolly Parton:
You knew everything about her, everything real and true, by her actions.
She was a Christian who spread the Gospel solely through taking care of the least fortunate among us.
She was a patriot who thought the best of America was in our diversity and never backed down from that.
She was a feminist who didn’t like calling herself a feminist but somehow made her feminism clear through her refusal to let others define her or hold back women or anyone else.
You always knew where she stood just by her example.
She was born fourth in a family of twelve kids. Great Smoky Mountains. Tennessee.
Dirt poor. Her family literally lived in a one-room cabin for some time. You ever hear someone use the phrase “out yonder”? They were out-out-yonder.
Her father was a sharecropper and farmer and worked odd jobs. Her mother kept the home as best as could be managed. Twelve kids. They couldn’t afford all sorts of things, but they made it work.
Did y’all know she was a prodigy? As a little girl, she put together her first guitar using a mandolin and bass strings. She was on the local radio by 10. She put out her first record by 11. She was introduced at the Grand Ole Opry by Johnny Cash at 13.
She loved her family and she loved Jesus and she loved music. That’s all she ever needed in the world from a young age. She worked her ass off for years toward her dream. No real connections. She just did the damn thing and wouldn’t stop until she got there.
62 years as an adult of doing the damn thing.
44 country albums in the top ten. 25 number-one singles. 55 top ten singles. 110 charting singles.
100 million records sold worldwide. More than three billion streams with most of her work released before streaming was a thing.
11 Grammys. Three Emmys. Nominations for Golden Globes and Tonys.
National Medal of the Arts. Kennedy Center Honoree. She actually declined the Presidential Medal of Freedom three times: twice during Trump’s first term because of her husband being ill and then COVID and then again from Pres. Biden because she didn’t want people to think the first two rejections were political.
Perhaps most famously, after the Tennessee state legislature enthusiastically began moving to pass a resolution that would pay for a statue of her on the Capitol grounds, she released a public statement requesting they withdraw it.
Why?
“I am honored and humbled by their intention but I have asked the leaders of the state legislature to remove the bill from any and all consideration. Given all that is going on in the world, I don’t think putting me on a pedestal is appropriate at this time.”
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Country Music Hall of Fame. Songwriters Hall of Fame. Gospel Music Hall of Fame. Grammy Hall of Fame. That’s a fraction of the halls of fame in which she is enshrined.
But none of this is why we love Dolly Parton. The entire list of accolades and achievements doesn’t begin to capture why she achieved sainthood in her lifetime without ever asking for it, much less believing such a thing is appropriate.
We love Dolly Parton because she never forgot where she came from and had the awareness to understand there were places all over the world just like hers and people in them who needed some help.
We love Dolly Parton because she donated more than 100 million books to children in her lifetime through her Imagination Library — because she knew what it was like to be a child in an area where books were scarce.
We love her because the Dollywood Foundation raised countless millions for causes ranging from rural poverty to hunger to disaster relief to HIV/AIDS.
We love her because she quite literally funded the early development stages of the Moderna vaccine during the COVID crisis with an emergency $1M donation to Vanderbilt University Medical Center — and then made a point of modeling great leadership by publicly getting the vaccine and encouraging others to do the same.
We love her because she never failed to show up and tell marginalized groups that we matter, the politics and the blowback be damned, from speaking up in support of same-sex marriage to speaking out against racism. Tell me another Christian of her global stature and from her particular background who so publicly loved trans people on the basis that Christ loves trans people.
All that and a lot more, and yet, she still found time to help preserve the bald eagle.
We love Dolly Parton’s music, but that’s not why we love her.
We love her because she spent her entire life unconditionally loving us.
Thank you Charlotte. Dolly was the best of us. She exemplified Christianity. She never judged - at least not publicly. I say that because I did not know her personally.
You did her justice in this post. It brought me some comfort in my grief. Again, thank you.
Yes, the wrong 80 year old. Again.
.