Goodbye, Dolly

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

American music icon, film star, entrepreneur, and philanthropist Dolly Parton passed away yesterday at a cancer center in Nashville following a brief illness.  Songs she wrote and recorded comprise a significant part of the American songbook and include such major hits as "I Will Always Love You, "Jolene," "Coat of Many Colors," and "Nine to Five."

Parton, who was known beyond the music industry for her business acumen, founded a range of successful enterprises including "Dollywood," a major family theme park in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, near the Great Smoky Mountains, "Dolly Parton's Stampede," a dinner theater near Branson, Missouri, and she recently opened "Dolly's Tennessean Travel Stop near an exit on Interstate 65 in Cornersville, Tennessee, about an hour south of Nashville.  She was at the opening of the travel center last month, an event which proved to be her final public appearance.

Dolly was also a noted philanthropist who managed to give much of what she made to people in need.  Her "Imagination Library," which she started in 1995, provides a free children's book every month to thousands of children under the age of five in the United States and in several foreign nations.  To date more that 330 million books have been provided in her effort to promote literacy and give little kids something of their own.  She donated a million dollars to coronavirus research during the pandemic, and started a program to lower the school dropout rate in her home county in Tennessee that was hugely successful.  And there were other examples as well - Dolly had a focus on helping others and always being ready to offer a hand up.

Dolly Parton's husband of nearly sixty years, Carl Dean, passed away in Nashville last year.  Dean owned and operated a construction firm.  The couple had no children.

I have a Dolly Parton story which I shared in this space one other time but will shamelessly repeat it here anyway.  In the late 1960's or early 1970's while Dolly was still a regular Porter Wagoner's television show, she and Porter appeared at the Shrine Mosque in Springfield, Missouri.  Some college friends and I had nothing better to do on a Saturday night and decided to walk the several blocks to the Mosque and see the show -  and it was great.  Dolly and Porter both sparkled like human disco balls, and her songs were angelic.  

Years later I was at a barber shop in West Plains, Missouri, Porter Wagoner's hometown and my current place of residence, and it was Dolly's birthday - a fact that somehow got into the general conversation at the hair emporium.  I bragged to the barber that I had seen Dolly perform in person in Springfield in my younger days, and the barber quickly shot down my boast when he replied that he had seen her singing atop a hay wagon in the public square of West Plains!

And I didn't doubt him for a minute because that's who Dolly Parton was - one of us, a common person from a hardscrabble background who had the gumption to get on a bus the day after she graduated from high school and move, alone and on her own, to Nashville and make a name for herself in the music industry.  A person with that level of grit and resolve would not hesitate to climb on a hay wagon and sing for a few hundred strangers.

Dolly Parton did well in life, and she set the bar for sharing her blessings with others.

The President of the United States has ordered that our nation's flags be flown at half-staff for the next seven days out of respect for Dolly Parton.    It is an honor well deserved.