It’s the kind of saying that’s become nearly cliché to utter out loud: There’s only one thing a divided America can agree on, and that one thing is Dolly Parton.
The musical icon, songwriter, and philanthropist died on Aug. 25, and all across the country, fans are in mourning. And not just fans of her music, but fans of her. Fans of what she stood for, fans of her advocacy work, fans of what loving Dolly Parton meant in and of itself. Parton didn’t just create music, but a feeling. While Parton could tell a story through lyric better than almost anyone else, she was also masterful in helping to shape the narrative of a country that so desperately needed to feel togetherness. We can disagree at the polls, in our homes, online. But we all agreed on Parton.
Yet Dolly wanted more than just a world united in praise. She wanted a world united, period.
The fact that we could all love Parton was proving that we could, somehow, agree on something. It was the grand experiment of her long, incredibly prolific career: that human experiences, and compassion, are universal. She believed that within each of us was the ability to see one another for who we are beyond the division, and used herself as a sort of trojan horse. We think we love Parton (and we do), but inside us lies the capacity to love and understand one another, no matter how different we may be. Dolly’s life was the chorus that she hoped would lead us to sing harmony.
“I do not sit in the seat of judgment,” Parton once said. “I love people for who they are. We’re all God’s children.”
Parton could hold this sort of role not only because she was brilliant at understanding the balance necessary to spur compassion without making it feel partisan, but because she came from a relatable place that worked its way directly into her songs. She sang about growing up in poverty, she sang about love and heartbreak, and she integrated her strong faith into almost everything she did. Before anything else, her music showed us she understood our pain, our relationships, our suffering. How better to prepare us to listen?
What exactly was it about Parton that was so uniting? It’s a captivating enough question that an entire podcast, Dolly Parton’s America, was dedicated to trying to answer it. That show, and others like it, explored how Parton was politically neutral, which made her the kind of person that almost everyone could rally behind.
But Parton wasn’t neutral. Like any masterful writer, she was artful in her word choice, not her actions. She didn’t call herself a “feminist,” but she moved through the world with feminist action. She didn’t get behind candidates or policies, but she advocated for LGBTQ+ rights and racial equality, child literacy, and accessible healthcare. During the Covid-19 pandemic, she donated a million dollars to vaccine development and even shared a video of her receiving the shot (single-handedly bringing cold shoulder tops back into fashion). Parton turned “issues” into simple gestures of humanity. By never calling it politics, she knew she could help us see the story beyond the noise.
Back in 2021, Parton asked that a bill proposing a statue in her likeness at the Tennessee State Capitol in Nashville be dropped. She didn’t like how, with everything going on in the world, the emphasis should be on her. “I hope, though, that somewhere down the road several years from now or perhaps after I’m gone if you still feel I deserve it, then I’m certain I will stand proud in our great State Capitol as a grateful Tennessean,” she said. It was a humble action, and more than anything, she wanted to model that humility could be just as possible as love.
Besides, hero worship was never the point for Parton. We all loved her, and she knew it. She didn’t need a statue. However, she wanted us to take that feeling of compassion and understanding, and pass it on to one another, using the lesson of love like a never-ending chorus. To see what can happen when we think of each other as humans, not just hot-button-issues. That lasts even longer than stone.
