Dolly

There was a time in my life when I didn't give a flip about country music.

In fact, I don't think I developed a serious appreciation for any kind of music until I reached high school. Probably about the same time that the '60's hit the scene. I think what happened was that, for two summers, I worked as the maintenance guy at the community swimming pool. I was at the pool from opening to closing every day through the summer and consequently I got a steady diet of popular music over the PA system: Beatles, Stones, Dylan, Peter, Paul and Mary, the Hollies, CCR – the whole 60s package. My life changed.

Dolly

 Decades passed. Still no country, though.

Then, finally, in the 90s, I heard Whitney Houston sing "I Will Always Love You" and was taken in with the lyrics. Beautiful lyrics. Moving lyrics coupled with a soul-melting melody.

About the same time, my wife, Kim, introduced me to the country side of the road and I began an appreciation of artists like Patty Loveless, Martina McBride, Trisha Yearwood, Alison Krauss and a few others.

Somewhere along the way, I heard Dolly sing "I Will Always Love You."  Then, to my surprise, I learned she wrote the song.

Say what? I didn't know that. Why would I think a country star could write a tune like that? Not only that, she wrote it in the '70s. In 1974, to be exact. Where was I? Oh, yeah. Listening to Eagles and Yes and the Police.

I guess I would hope to tell you that Dolly soon became a favorite of mine, but it didn't happen that way. I was never particularly enamored with her singing voice and I thought those breast augmentations, makeup overloads and ridiculous wigs more or less turned her into a silly caricature of herself. Show business, I guess.

And yet...

As her fame increased, so did her authentic self. Her immense wealth allowed her to become a philanthropist and in 1988 Parton founded the non-profit Dollywood Foundation. The foundation was originally created to inspire the children of her home county in Sevier, TN, to aim for educational success and to decrease the county high school's dropout rate.

Out of that was created the Buddy Program, which pledged $500 to each seventh and eight grade student who eventually graduated from the local high school. Consequently, the dropout rate dropped from 35 percent to 6 percent. 

But it became something even bigger than that. By 1995 Parton created the Imagination Library, an offshoot of the Dollywood Foundation which gifted a book monthly to children under the age of 5 in Sevier County. But the program eventually grew to international heights. To date, Parton's literacy program has donated more than 200 million free books. At one point, the Library of Congress called Parton "a titan of children's literacy."

The library was founded in honor of her father, who never learned to read nor write.

Now get this: in 2022, employees of Dollywood, the theme park co-owned with her entertainment company, would have their college tuition and related fees paid for by the park. Parton was her own department of education. 

This is making me cry.

In 2016, she created the My People Fund, which provided $1,000 per month for six months to families who lost their homes in the wildfires of Sevier County. When the program ended a year later, more than $12 million had been raised and distributed. Parton was her own FEMA office.

She was also her own department of health and human services. In 2006 she pledged $500,000 for a hospital and cancer center in Seveirville, TN.

Then, in 2020, Parton donated $1 million to Vanderbilt University to help in the research for for a COVID-19 vaccine. Indeed, her donation expedited the critical early development of the Moderna vaccine. She was famously vaccinated herself at Vanderbilt to help set an example.

A few months later, Parton donated another $1 million to Vanderbilt for pediatric infectious disease research.

I'm still weeping.

Parton, as previously noted, was also essential in donating to natural disasters. In 2024, she donated $2 million – including $1 million personally with the balance coming through her foundation – to relief efforts after the onslaught on Hurricane Helene through the Appalachian Mountains, causing at least 106 deaths in North Carolina alone.

Although she was politically neutral, she was an advocate for the gay community, supporting same-sex marriages as well as voicing support for the trans community.

Many of these donations and pledges came quietly and, consequently, we may never know the true extent of her philanthropic career.

Maybe it's just enough to know that she will always love you.