The legacy between the covers
There was always so much glitter that it was easy to miss what Dolly Parton was doing with all her light.
She wore rhinestones by the thousands. Her hair reached up toward heaven. Her fingernails were impeccable and impractical, her clothes unapologetic, and she built an entire public image around being completely impossible to overlook.
And then, once the world was looking, she kept pointing its attention somewhere else.
Toward a child who needed a book. Toward a family whose home had burned. Toward a student wondering whether college was possible.
Toward a hospital room. Toward scientists searching for answers while the world was frightened and sick.
Dolly spent a lifetime making herself larger than life, then used that enormous life to make room for other people.
Of course, there are the songs. There will always be the songs.
“Jolene” will keep begging. “Coat of Many Colors” will keep reminding us that poverty and love can occupy the same little house. “I Will Always Love You” will continue breaking hearts in voices Dolly never could have imagined when she wrote it.
There are the movies, the wigs, the rhinestones and the one-liners. Dolly always understood exactly what people saw when they looked at her.
She also knew there were more important things to leave behind.
Some of them are sitting on bookshelves. Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library began in 1995 in Sevier County, Tennessee, where she grew up. It was inspired in large part by her father, Robert Lee Parton, a hardworking man who never had the opportunity to learn to read and write.
From that one county, the program grew until millions of books were being mailed each month to children from birth to age 5.
For some children, that package may be the first piece of mail they ever recognize as their own.
And the journey begins with “The Little Engine That Could.”
Before the story begins, there is a letter from Dolly.
Before a baby knows what country music is,beforetheyknowDollywoodor Grammys or rhinestone-covered jumpsuits, Dolly Parton is already there, inside the cover of a book, telling them to dream.
She tells them books inspired her own dreams and encourages them to dream more, learn more, care more and be more.
Then she signs it simply: “Love, Dolly.” Maybe that is why the Imagination Library has always felt different from so many celebrity charitable projects.
It does not feel like a monument to Dolly Parton.
It feels like Dolly kneeling beside a child and saying, Here. This is for you.
A book can take a child living on an Oklahoma dirt road to the bottom of the ocean. It can show a lonely child that someone else has felt lonely, too. It can make a child wonder whether there might be more waiting beyond the place where they were born.
Dolly understood that because she had once been that child.
She grew up one of 12 children in a one-room cabin in the mountains of East Tennessee. She knew what it was to have very little.
And perhaps because she knew it so well, when she finally had more than enough, she seemed determined to send some of it back down the mountain.
The Imagination Library was only a small part of it.
Her Dollywood Foundation worked to keep children in school. Through the Buddy Program, seventh- and eighth-graders were promised $500 if they graduated from high school. The foundation later provided scholarships to students pursuing higher education.
When wildfires devastated Sevier County in 2016 and destroyed more than 1,000 homes, Dolly called those affected “my people.”
Then she proved she meant it. The My People Fund provided families who lost their homes $1,000 a month for six months, ultimately distributing millions of dollars.
There is something important in that phrase.
Not those people. Not the victims. My people. Their hurt mattered to her. That instinct stretched beyond Sevier County.
Dolly donated $1 million to the pediatric cancer program at Vanderbilt in honor of her niece, who had been treated for leukemia there as a child.
In 2020, as hospitals filled and scientists raced to understand COVID-19, she gave another $1 million to Vanderbilt for coronavirus research. Her donation helped support research connected to the Moderna vaccine.
Later, she gave another $1 million for pediatric infectious disease research.
Books. Scholarships. Wildfire relief. Children’s hospitals. Medical research. Again and again, the pattern was the same.
Dolly noticed somewhere people were hurting and tried to make the hurt a little smaller.
The same woman who sang about a coat sewn from rags never forgot what poverty looked like when nobody was singing about it.
The woman who made an art form out of looking expensive never seemed embarrassed by where she came from.
She did not climb out of the mountains and pull the ladder up behind her.
She kept reaching back. And that is what makes those books arriving in mailboxes feel like more than books.
A child does not know about dropout rates, wildfire funds or medical research when the package comes.
They just know there is something in the mailbox with their name on it.
They tear open the plastic. They crawl into someone’s lap. They turn the pages.
Maybe Mom reads it. Maybe Dad does. Maybe Grandma reads the same sentence six times because a tiny little hand keeps turning back to the picture of the dog.
Maybe the book gets colored in. Maybe somebody sleeps with it. Maybe the corners curl, the spine cracks and a page eventually tears loose.
That means it was loved. The rhinestone costumes will live behind glass. The wigs will become museum pieces. The songs will be discovered again by generations who were not alive when Dolly first sang them.
That is immortality of one kind. But there is another kind that is harder to put in a museum.
It is scattered across millions of homes, on bookshelves and under beds.
It is in the child who entered kindergarten already believing books were something to love.
It is in the graduate who stayed in school. It is in a Tennessee family who could buy groceries after losing everything in a fire.
It is in laboratories and hospital rooms, in lives changed in ways that may never be traced all the way back to her.
Perhaps that is the finest legacy anyone could hope for.
Not merely that people remember your name.
But that somewhere, someone is living a slightly better life because you were here.
Dolly Parton spent decades sparkling brightly enough for the whole world to see her.
Then she gave away the light. Some of it went to families, to students, to doctors and scientists, and month after month, some of it traveled through the mail in a little package addressed to a child.
Inside was a book. Inside the book was a world. And somewhere near the beginning was a woman from the mountains telling another little dreamer that they could be more.
The first story said it best. I think I can, I think I can, I think I can… Dolly did. And then she spent her life showing other people they could too.
Be kind to your neighbors. Be kind to your pets. And leave a little light behind for somebody else to find.