Dolly

The news broke right after lunch and I did what I suspect a few million other people did. I stopped what I was doing and just sat there for a minute.

Dolly Parton died in Nashville at 80, after what her family called a brief battle with cancer. Her nephew Bryan Seaver announced it, because she’d asked him to years ago. She even planned the goodbye. Of course she did.

The numbers are staggering. I really had no idea. Fifty studio albums. Eleven Grammys. More than 100 million records sold. She wrote “Jolene” and “I Will Always Love You,” and either one alone would be a career. But the numbers were never really the point with Dolly, and I think she knew that better than anyone.

She was maybe the last public figure in America that everybody agreed on. Country fans and pop fans. Red states and blue states. Your grandmother and your teenager. Nobody pulled that off. She did, and she did it without ever pretending to be anything other than a girl from a one-room cabin in the Smoky Mountains who liked big hair and bigger songs.

Most importantly, she spent the money on other people. Her Imagination Library has mailed hundreds of millions of free books to kids. She helped fund the research behind a COVID vaccine and barely mentioned it. When the family announced her passing, they didn’t ask for flowers. They asked for donations to the book program.

The songs will outlive all of us. But what I’ll remember is simpler than that. She showed you could be enormous and kind at the same time, and that the kindness was the real act.