Dolly Parton Never Wavered

From making music to launching a huge literacy program, the singer always took her work seriously. Eventually, the rest of us caught up.

Was she a saint? A goddess? An angel with a hairspray halo? Dolly Parton knew how people saw her, and embraced her role as pop culture fairy godmother. She had her wings on-screen at least, having worn them in no fewer than three roles over the years (two of them Christmas movies, naturally). When “What would Dolly do?” became a cliché, Parton used it for the name of a podcast. Divine or not, she never turned down a good branding opportunity.

Those who ascribe to Dolly Parton a supernatural strength got a sad reminder that she was all too human when she died at age 80 earlier this week. Especially in recent years, the deaths of celebrities tend to prompt a public rehashing of their work, personal life, and any unsavory offenses. Not so with Parton; no caveats, no complications, no questions. Just adoration and sadness, much more often citing her philanthropic work and various good deeds than anything about her career as an artist and entertainer. Below the grief there’s a sense of losing something endangered, the idea that while we’ve got a fair number of great musicians, paragons of virtue and kindness feel harder and harder to come by.

The road to Saint Dolly, though, was a longer one than it might feel given how overwhelming Dolly-mania has been, especially over the past decade or two. Before that, especially during the period of her greatest artistic and commercial success, she was patronized and mocked—known better as a punch line than as the virtuoso she’s been all along. She owned the boob jokes from the beginning—who knows, maybe she even started them—but either way they were relentless, from all corners. She handled them and all the other patronizing comments and questions about her background and looks with grace and good humor, offering gentle retorts that would, decades later, become memes. If we like and share them enough maybe we can prove we’ve been Team Dolly from the start, pure and true rather than snarky and superficial. After all, Dolly was the same all along, from the apocryphal day she stepped off a Greyhound bus in Nashville to the very end. The rest of us just finally caught up.

“Find out who you are and do it on purpose.” It’s one of Parton’s most famous quotes, one recycled into something pat—but there’s no question that she lived that mantra. Her steadiness, certainty, and self-assurance made all those around her, the would-be detractors and skeptics, seem weak and small. Everything she did was a choice: the devotion to music and songwriting, the........

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