Dolly

Dolly Parton died today in Nashville, Tennessee, at the age of 80.

If you live outside of Tennessee, you're likely going to be puzzled, in the coming days and weeks, by the way her passing is about to dominate your social media feeds. Because you're going to see post after post from people down here, all mourning this woman they've never met. Some of those posts will be maudlin. Corny. Some, God knows, will include folks holding up candles and crying and holding impromptu wakes in a Dollywood parking lot. One of them will be this one. I'll try to help you understand why.

I never met Dolly. I was never that lucky. I got to see her perform one time in a tribute to Tennessee at a Vols halftime show. there were rumors for years that she and her husband Carl would come down to the Chattanooga area once a year to celebrate their wedding anniversary, which was in nearby Ringold, Georgia, in 1966. But I never met her. My relationship with Dolly was exactly like her relationships with most of the 7 million or so people who live in this state. I heard her on the radio, I saw her on tv, and when my daughter was younger she used to get books from her in the mail.

So let's start with those books. Dolly's Imagination Library program has mailed out something like a quarter of a billion, closer now to 300 million, books to children. Those books were all free, once a month, all the way from the moment those children were born until they turned five years old. She started the program up in Sevier County because her own father, who was a poor sharecropper, never learned to read. Dolly knew from experience exactly what that had cost him. The Imagination Library program spread across the country, and eventually into other countries, but it started as a Tennessee thing back in 1995, and it never felt like a charity program. It felt like your friend Dolly, who was kind of like your next door neighbor, had stopped by to drop of a little present. She was a rich neighbor, for sure, in a very big wig, but she was your neighbor, and she cared about you.

That's the thing about Dolly that's hard to explain to people who didn't grow up here, with her. She was aspirational and familiar all at once, and you never had to choose between the two. She was a multi-millionaire who had somehow built and empire and an economy in the shady hollers of the Smokies, she was a songwriter whose catalog genuinely ranks amongst the most impressive American bodies of work, she was an actress that used her fake boobs, fake hair, and everything else to come across more genuine that almost anyone else on the screen, and she was a businesswoman with a better nose for the deal than any man who ever tried to manage her.

And with all that said, there was never a whiff, never a hint, of pretense. Greatness and humility are supposed to exist in tension, but in Dolly, they weren't. She was great and she was humble, and she was both without one either encroaching on the other. And the effect that had on the people who grew up watching her was almost like permission. You could be great, we learned from watching Dolly, without having to be somebody else.

Dolly was a hillbilly. She said so herself. She said it often and she said it cheerfully and she said it in exactly the tone that dared anyone to mock her for it. The part that y'all who aren't from around here might not have noticed is that every time anyone laughed at Dolly, at the big wig or the fake boobs or the accent or the poverty she came from, she was already three moves ahead. She could deprecate like it was an art, so the joke was never, ever, on her. She had it, she held it, and she handed it back with a big smile, and by the time anyone could realize what she'd done, she'd invited them down for a visit and sold them a ticket to boot. There's a very specific kind of Appalachian intelligence in that. A kind of slyness born of being from a people who have spent generations being underestimated by people from somewhere else. And of that art, Dolly was the finest living practitioner. Watching Dolly work a room of coastal sophisticates, and seeing them all inevitably fall under her spell, was like watching a card sharp rake in the chips from a table where every other player though they had the best hand.

Because Dolly was smart. And she was great. But more than smart and more than great, more than maybe anything she was, Dolly was kind. Not the vague, approved by her publicist, tailored for impact and recognition kindness that we see in celebrities. Dolly's kindness was genuine and it was specific. When the fires raged through the mountains up in Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge back in the fall of 2016, taking fourteen lives and a couple thousand homes, Dolly didn't post a statement offering her thoughts and prayers and then move on. She set up a fund and paid families who'd lost their homes thousands of dollars a month, out of her own pocket and the pockets she knew how to open. And she did it for months, and then, when it was all said and done, sent a bigger check than any of them expected. Having grown up in a little cabin on the Little Pigeon River, she looked at the devastation, at what that meant to her people, and she said "I've got you." And she did versions of that, quietly and without asking for praise, her whole life.

Dolly was Southern. Southern in all the ways y'all like to mock us for. Southern in the way that describes the very best things we are capable of being. The hospitality. The warmth. The porch light left on. The casserole hand delivered to your house when a loved one passes. The sense that anyone who wanders up the drive is a guest until they let you know otherwise. When you're from a place that much of the country sees as a punchline, getting to watch someone from that place welcome in the whole world engenders a particular kind of gratitude. And a particular kind of pride when the whole world, without ever really having any say in it at all, welcomes her back.

Dolly's art, which I'm not even really touching on, was a product of the same place that produced her. Not Nashville, even though Dolly conquered Music City, but of the hills. The hollers. The Great Smoky Mountains. Her music spoke to and of the specific loneliness and closeness of a family of twelve kids all piled into a one room cabin. Song she wrote when she was nineteen or twenty-one or twenty-eight are all the songs of someone who knew exactly what it was and what it meant to have nothing. To have somebody and to lose somebody. To leave a place but to carry it with you wherever you went. What I think Dolly proved, what she proved over and over and kept proving her entire career, all to a county that sometimes would have rather not believed it, it that poor, backwoods, backwards people are capable of making beauty so profound and so touching that everything else has to stop. That is no small thing to prove. And Dolly did it with a pen, a guitar, and her voice.

So here's why you're going to see so many Dolly posts today. And tomorrow. And in the weeks to come and every anniversary of this day for years.

Dolly made us proud. Proud in the same way you might be proud of the first kid in the family to go to college. Proud of the way you're proud of someone in your family who went out into the world and did well and came home and was somehow, against all odds, herself. Proud of what she did, sure. But mostly proud of who she was. Of who she remained through six decades or so of a business and a world that so often turns people into something else. Proud of how she represented herself. How she represented here. How she represented us, to people who have never been here and mostly never would be.

Dolly was good. There's not a better or more sophisticated word for it. Dolly was good and she will always be good. And a great many of us who were never lucky enough to shake her hand or stand in the same room with here are going to spend the next little while grieving as though we had, because it almost every way that could possibly matter, we did.

We didn't deserve Dolly. We knew it and we know it. We didn't deserve Dolly, but we were so proud to claim her. And to be claimed by her.