An Angel Walked Among Us |
Dolly Parton died Tuesday in Nashville at 80.
And somehow even writing that sentence feels wrong.
Dolly was one of those people who seemed like she had simply always been here. The hair. The rhinestones. That laugh. That unmistakable Tennessee voice. The songs everybody knew whether they listened to country music or not.
But there was something else about her too.
Not the manufactured kind celebrities sometimes discover when a camera arrives. The real thing.
Her nephew announced her death in a video Dolly had asked him, years ago, to record for exactly this moment. Think about that. Even in planning how the world would learn she was gone, Dolly was thinking about the people who loved her and what she wanted them to hear.
That sounds like her.
I’ve written a lot of columns this year about people behaving badly.
Today I don’t want to do that.
Today I want to write about somebody who spent eighty years reminding us what behaving well looked like.
Dolly Rebecca Parton was born in a one-room cabin in the Great Smoky Mountains, one of twelve children in a family that didn’t have much money but had plenty of faith.
Her father famously paid the doctor who delivered her with a sack of cornmeal.
That’s how poor they were.
And yet if you listened to Dolly talk about........