Dolly Parton: a lot more than Jolene
There are few universal truths that we as a collective humanity can agree on without trying to kill each other, a few being that all good things must come to an end, that actions have consequences and of course, the most well known, that death is an inevitable part of life. According to most science on the matter, children begin to understand that death is a permanent and irreversible affair between the ages of 5 and 7. So fundamentally we're all somewhat conscious of its ever-lingering presence for a considerable amount of time during our lives.Yet upon the news of a person's death, it never gets any easier to hear.
On the 25th of August 2026 it was announced to the world that Dolly Parton, born Dolly Rebecca Parton, had passed after a brief battle with cancer. She was born on the 19th of January 1946 in Locust Ridge, Tennessee and lived till the age of 80. She was laid to rest at Woodlawn Memorial Park and Mausoleum in Nashville next to her late husband Carl Dean, who had passed only 18 months earlier and to whom she had been married for 58 years.
For many of our readers Dolly Parton might be known as nothing more than an iconic country music singer with chart hits such as "9 to 5" and "Jolene", but her life tells a far more remarkable story and her death warrants a reflection that is, in my opinion, owed.
Born as child number 4 in what would eventually become a family of 12 children, she was raised in abject poverty in rural Tennessee. She wrote her first song at age 6, was performing regularly on radio and television by age 10, and made her first professional recording at 13. After starting out by writing songs for others, her debut album was released in 1967, titled Hello, I'm Dolly, which introduced the world to an artist who would span a musical career of nearly 60 years. Her discography culminated into a total of 49 solo studio albums and more than 3,000 songs, which is certainly no small feat. For perspective, the Beatles as a group released only 188 original songs and after splitting created a total of roughly 750 songs.
At the age of 20 she married Carl Dean, together they spent 58 years married, and 60 years together. After his death she released a tribute song, "If You Hadn't Been There", in which she called him her rock and a soft place to land, and sang that she wouldn't be here if he hadn't been. An incredibly bittersweet way of viewing it, because for many of us our situationship won't even text us back, but I digress.
Anyone who hasn't been living under a rock knows that Dolly Parton was a famous country and western singer, and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to point it out either. Music is not the only place Dolly shined though, as her life was also one dedicated to philanthropy and advocacy.
In 1988 she founded the Dollywood Foundation, which she created to help improve the educational outcomes of children in her home county in Tennessee. One of its early efforts was the Buddy Program, which paired seventh and eighth-grade students with a friend and had them pledge to support each other in staying at school and graduating; as a result the drop-out rate in participating classes went from 35% to 6%. In 1995 the Dollywood Foundation further expanded to include Dolly Parton's Imagination Library, in honour of her father, who was himself illiterate but who Dolly described as one of the wisest men she had ever known. The program mails one book per month to each enrolled child from the time of their birth until they hit kindergarten, and it now sends more than 3 million books a month to children across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Australia. In February 2018 her 100 millionth free book was donated to the Library of Congress and as of her death that figure has passed 332 million.
In 2022 Dollywood, a theme park co-owned by her entertainment company in her home state, announced that employees who decided to go to college would have their tuition, books and other fees paid for by the company. Later that year, in October, it was also revealed that she had been paying for the uniforms of band members at a group of Tennessee high schools for a number of years.
Her philanthropy did not extend just to education, but also to other areas. In December 2006 she pledged $500,000 toward a proposed $90 million hospital and cancer centre to be constructed in Sevierville in the name of Robert F. Thomas, the physician that had delivered her. She made further "generational and transformational" donations of undisclosed amounts to the East Tennessee Children's Hospital, as told by the hospital's president and chief executive officer; in honour of this it was later named the Dolly Parton Children's Hospital. She also gave a further $1 million to Vanderbilt University Medical Center in April 2020, money that helped fund the research behind Moderna's COVID-19 vaccine, and another $1 million in 2022 for paediatric infectious disease research.
Her efforts also extended to the LGBTQI+ community, having a long history of openly supporting people of the queer community. She came out in public support of same-sex marriage in 2009, and further voiced her support for the trans community after a series of anti-trans measures came into law in Tennessee in 2023.
As a result of all this, Dolly will be duly missed by myself and the team at The Tert. Her life extended 80 strong years, with a large portion of it touching the lives of those around her and extending to people she would ultimately never meet. She also reinforced that being at the top doesn't mean losing sight of decency, humility and a dedication to helping others.
Dolly, you may have been from worlds apart, but we know that your legacy will live on and we certainly tip our hats to you for the work you have done both in the world of music and the world around us. We'll all rest knowing that if Heaven does exist, your voice and personality will certainly add to the choir of greats that stand waiting at the gates to greet you.
Rest easy, Dolly.
