Dolly Parton was a country singer in roughly the same way that the Atlantic Ocean is a puddle. Yes, country music was her native language. She came from the Tennessee mountains, carried the accent, the rhinestones, the enormous hair and the apparently indestructible smile. She could have walked into a cartoonist’s office labelled “Country Music Star” and emerged looking exactly like the finished drawing. Yet to describe her merely as a country singer is to confuse the wrapping paper with the present.
Dolly Parton was a global cultural phenomenon. And perhaps the most remarkable thing about her was that she understood the joke before anyone else did.
Everything about her appearance seemed designed to invite ridicule: the wigs, the costumes, the impossible eyelashes, the exaggerated femininity, the calculated glamour. But the joke was frequently on the audience. Behind the Dolly caricature was one of the most formidable creative minds American popular culture produced. She wrote songs with the emotional economy of great short stories. Love, jealousy, poverty, ambition, loneliness, ageing, work and heartbreak passed through her music without requiring intellectual decoration.
She could write “Jolene” and make desperation sound elegant. She could write “9 to 5” and turn workplace frustration into a pop anthem. She could write “I Will Always Love You” and somehow create a song so durable that another singer could transform it into an entirely different cultural event.
That is not simply country music. That is songwriting. But Parton’s extraordinary achievement was not confined to music. She understood something that modern America increasingly seems to forget: fame is not necessarily a moral achievement, but what one does with fame can be.
Her philanthropy was almost startling in its practicality. She did not merely talk about children; she gave them books. Her Imagination Library, inspired partly by her father’s inability to read, became an international literacy programme, sending free books to young children regardless of their families’ income.
There is something wonderfully subversive about that. A woman who became an icon of glitter and commercial entertainment spent decades quietly putting books into children’s hands.
And then there was her peculiar American genius for kindness without ideological packaging. Parton has repeatedly demonstrated sympathy for people who do not necessarily fit comfortably inside the conservative cultural world from which she emerged. Her openness towards LGBT people and others subjected to prejudice has made her an unusual figure in an America increasingly addicted to sorting human beings into political tribes.
She did not need to become a professional political warrior. She simply behaved as though kindness were not a partisan position.That may be why she became so difficult to hate.
Parton understood that America contains contradictions. A poor girl from rural Tennessee could become fabulously wealthy without forgetting poverty. A woman who looked like the ultimate stereotype could become one of the culture’s great dismantlers of stereotypes. Someone apparently manufactured from rhinestones and show business could possess a remarkably serious understanding of human vulnerability.
Today’s America has no shortage of billionaires, celebrities, influencers and politicians telling us how much they care about ordinary people.
Dolly Parton actually did something. That is the difference. Her greatest creation may therefore not be a song, a film, a theme park or even a brand. It may be the character called Dolly Parton, deliberately larger than life, apparently ridiculous, genuinely brilliant, profoundly American and underneath all those rhinestones, unexpectedly humane.
She made kindness look glamorous.
And America could use considerably more of that.
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