Lessons from Dolly

This one hurts, badly.

I was designing last week's issue of The Beacon when Dolly Parton's family issued a release saying the 80-year-old wildflower from East Tennessee died after a lifetime of showing us all what the better angels of our nature could look like in rhinestones and heels.

Every sip of coffee I drank at my last job in Maine was in the custom JOSH mug I bought at Dollywood in Pigeon Forge.

One of the first times I remember being moved by music was listening to "Coat of Many Colors" with my mother when I was very small.

The last gift my father ever bought me was a donation in my name to Dolly's Imagination Library.

It just hurts to lose her. Badly. 

And I have been moved to tears staring at my phone often in the past week. At Tennessee transplant Jack White tearing into his punk cover of "Jolene," scream singing as if to death herself, "Don't take him from me just because you can." At the King of England's own band busting out "9 to 5" at Buckingham Palace. At Eminem, who never even met Parton, releasing the touching, generous letter she sent him when he was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

Dolly Parton probably was the most universally beloved American we had. The world is a colder place without her in it. But maybe, too, we take the good she put into the world and carry it a little further.

Lessons From Dolly

Be Yourself

Dolly never shied away from who she was, how she was raised or how she lived. While she wore her costumes like armor, in some ways, that allowed her to be more comfortable in her actual skin. She always had a ready joke about her look, the one she famously said she copied from a woman in town people in the 1960s looked down on for it. 

But you know the thing about actually, authentically being yourself, in all your weirdness and contradictions? It's good for you, sure. But it makes you a more accepting person, too. And I think thatís more important.

Dolly once entered a Dolly Parton Lookalike contest, and didn't win. What she did do, though, was go through her whole life accepting other people just how she found them. This won her fans from walks of life one would never expect for a country artist from the rural south who was born just months after World War II ended. But that was Dolly -- she loved unconditionally, and it shined through to seemingly everyone she ever met.

Country doesn’t mean dumb

Dolly's story of growing up dirt poor and one of 12 children in rural Tennessee resonates with so many rural Americans that amid her passing it can be easy to forget she became a brilliant businesswoman, philanthropist and leader.

Dollywood alone transformed her home region, serving as a boon to the local economy as well as a top-flight employer that paid well and reimbursed tuition. She single-handedly transformed high school graduation rates in the area by simply telling every kid in school to pick a buddy. If they both graduated, they both got $500 for college.

If people wanted to underestimate her, she was happy to let them. But make no mistake, Dolly Parton got things done, the most direct way possible.

When the hospital at Vanderbilt was furiously working on a COVID-19 vaccine in 2020, Dolly called them and asked them what they needed. When they said they needed money, she cut a check for a million dollars.

Two years later, she sent another check for $1 million to fund a center for research into pediatric infectious diseases.

Parton always stood ten toes down for where she was from, and nothing endeared her to people more.

Fight for your rights

For any who don't know the lore, Dolly got her first big break singing with Porter Wagoner, both on record and on his hit television show, back in the days when musical variety programs dominated the airwaves.

With her star in the music world shining brightly, and knowing Wagoner didn't want her to go, Parton went home and wrote perhaps her most famous ballad, "I Will Always Love You." She left, cut the record and embarked on a solo career.

Little did Dolly know she would immediately be faced with the singular most important decision of her professional life. Elvis Presley heard her song and had his management team reach out to Parton, saying he wanted to record it for his next album.

But there was a catch -- as there so often was for smaller artists who ran into the Presley machine. They wanted half of Dolly's publishing rights to the song.

After having just been released from her contract with Wagoner -- and after a sleepless night -- Parton made her decision. Despite it costing her a sure, large payday, she wasn't going to give up what was hers, Elvis or no.

That decision would prove to be among her best. When Whitney Houston covered the song for the Bodyguard soundtrack in 1992, it topped the charts for 14 straight weeks and earned Dolly an estimated $10 million.

Read a book

Dolly Parton's father struggled with both reading and writing. That was her impetus for beginning the Imagination Library. The premise is simple: Sign your child up when they are born, and Dolly will send them an age-appropriate book every month until they start school.

The only thing that matched the seemingly effortless elegance of her writing was her problem-solving, it seems.

And, as so often happened, what started small in Dolly's beloved Tennessee hills proved to be an American favorite. To date, the Imagination Library has mailed more than 300 million books to American children. In honor of her father, a sharecropper who managed to raise 12 kids despite struggling with the written word. Dolly wanted life to be a little easier for others than it had been for her daddy.

As for me, I will also remember Dolly Parton as a shining example of the kind of writer I want to be.

I'll never forget the first time I heard "Coat of Many Colors," and how every word both did work to drive the story forward while softly shining like it simply always had to be there, once you looked correctly. 

Parton tells the story of her mother taking a box of rags gifted to her by a neighbor and lovingly sewing them into a coat for Dolly to wear to school. It was, after all, "way down in the fall."

Itís a beautiful story of love and resourcefulness and innocence, with a Bible lesson thrown in, and itís still one of my favorite tunes.

What truly floored me had to wait until I made it to Dollywood in my 30s. When I turned a corner and suddenly, in front of me, was a glass case that held the coat Parton's mom had sewed for her -- along with the dry cleaning receipt she wrote the first pass of the lyrics on years later.

I am old enough, now, to know that there are different kinds of true stories. Sometimes facts get in the way of the actual truth of something -- especially the kinds of stories a singer like Dolly Parton is trying to say. I think I thought back in my brain somewhere -- from the seasons of my youth -- that Dolly took inspiration from Joseph's Bible story, and took it from there.

But there it was, right in front of me. A permanent reminder that a perfect story stands always waiting, if we can just get out of the way long enough to excavate it from our minds.

Go rest high on that mountain, Dolly. 

You always wrote it true -- and we all will always love you.

Linehan is the Beacon’s managing editor and welcomes story tips and comments at BrookingsBeacon@gmail.com