Dolly Parton, the beloved country-music superstar known for writing about the lives of regular people in more than 3,000 songs and, in later years, for giving away more than 300 million books to children around the world, has died in Nashville. Parton had recently shared updates about health issues she’d been dealing with since the death of her husband Carl Dean last year, and her representatives told People that her death in Nashville came after a “brief battle with cancer.” Her nephew and bodyguard Bryan Seaver announced her death in an Instagram video posted to her account on Aug. 25, saying, “Dolly has lived in the light and is in the arms of Jesus, surely met by Carl, her parents, and countless others who have watched her and longed for her to meet them in the heavens.” To her fans around the world, she was Saint Dolly—the American godmother who channeled the sorrows of everyday life into song, wrapping ugly truths in pretty packages. Though she was described by music journalist Robert Oermann as “the Mozart of our times,” Parton’s larger-than-life hair, excess in rhinestones, surgical implants, and cosmetic work concealed the iron will through which she confronted the day’s realities with her craft.
Most importantly, she wrote and sang with a woman’s voice and heart about topics that uniquely touched her gender. Her songs include stories of stillborn births (“Down From Dover”), suicide (“The Bridge”), shame (“Just Because I’m a Woman”), abuse (“A Gamble Either Way”), adoption (“Doing This for Your Sake”), isolation (“Two Doors Down”), mental institutions (“Daddy Come and Get Me”), and prostitution (“The Bargain Store”). I saw Parton play live in concert during her Pure & Simple Tour in October 2016, a month before the most divisive election in American collective memory, and a year before I began reporting a podcast on her life called Dolly Parton’s America.
At the time, I was looking for someone or something to believe in. On the television and in the news, hatred from both sides of the American political aisle had never seemed more grotesque, but at Parton’s show, we all sang together. Parton visited more than 60 cities that summer and fall.
Looking back, I can’t help but wonder if she knew it would be something of a healing tour, the last of its kind she would do. When I asked Parton what “Dolly Parton’s America” meant to her, she responded that her perspective wasn’t limited by borders, that it was Dolly Parton’s World: “I just think we need to love one another. I think we need to try a little harder.
We need to be a little kinder. We need to be a little smarter. We need to have more love and compassion.” The last time I saw her, she told me she was planning a comedy album.
She also said that, unlike other artists of her stature for whom posthumously released music has been a point of contention, she’d recorded many more songs of hope she’d put away in a vault, to be released throughout the hundred years following her death. Parton was a genius from humble origins. Because of them, she remained vulnerable, even relatable, in the public eye.
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