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Dolly Rebecca Parton Dean died Tuesday in Nashville at the age of 80. Her nephew Bryan Seaver announced it in a video she had asked him to record for her death years in advance:
“Dolly has lived in the light and is in the arms of Jesus,” he said, “surely met by Carl, her parents, and countless others.”
I will admit up front that Dolly sits well outside the usual territory of these letters, which usually concern Pope Leo XIV, the Catholic Church, and the fight for human dignity in American public life. But outside of my faith and my family, nothing matters more to me than being a Tennessean and an American, so I feel obliged to speak on the life and death of one of the last people in America admired across every line that divides us.
When the news reached my desk earlier this afternoon, I immediately broke down in tears — and I suspect a good many of you did too.
She was born on January 19, 1946, in a one-room cabin on Locust Ridge in Sevier County, the fourth of twelve children of Robert Lee Parton and Avie Lee Owens Parton. For those of you who don’t know Tennessee, Sevier County is a beautiful community located in the Smoky Mountains but, like many places in the rural South, has for generations struggled with poverty and, more recently, alcohol and drug epidemics.
Her delivery doctor, Robert F. Thomas, was paid with a sack of cornmeal because that was all that her father had. “I remember the time we didn’t have electricity in the early days,” she said in recent years. “We barely made it, but we did make it. We had a lot of stuff that money can’t buy anyhow, things like love and kindness and understanding.”
The day after she graduated from high school in 1964, she left for the big city of Nashville. Within a few years, she was singing on Porter Wagoner’s television show, and by 1974 she had gone out on her own. The songs that followed (“Jolene,” “I Will Always Love You,” “9 to 5,” “Coat of Many Colors”) became a core part of American life.
That last one is about a patchwork coat her mother stitched from rags while telling her the story of Joseph in Genesis. It remains perhaps the best English-language song anyone has written about being poor and loved at the same time.
Her climb from that small East Tennessee cabin inspired millions of people who grew up with nothing. Most importantly, she never forgot where she came from.
Here’s how the legend of Dolly Parton came to be.
