story by editor-in-chief: Ashly Nicole

There are people who become famous, and then there are people who become so deeply woven into our lives that it is difficult to imagine the world without them, and Dolly Parton was most certainly one of those people. For as long as I can remember, Dolly was there. Her voice, her songs, her on screen apperances, her unmistakable laugh, her larger-than-life hair and personality. She was someone generations grew up with, and despite becoming one of the most recognizable people in the world, she never felt unreachable. Dolly felt familiar, she felt like someone everyone knew, and that is only some of what makes saying goodbye to her so difficult.

I know that no one lives forever. We all understand that eventually, the people we admire will leave us, but Dolly always felt like an exception to that rule, she felt almost immortal. It was difficult to picture a world where Dolly Parton wasn't somewhere in it, writing another song, telling another story, making another joke or finding another way to help somebody. Perhaps that feeling came from the fact that Dolly had already managed to fit what seemed like several lifetimes into one.

The life and legacy of our dear, Dolly

Before she became Dolly Parton, the global icon, she was a little girl growing up in the mountains of East Tennessee.

Born on January 19th, 1946 in Pittman Center, Tennessee, Dolly was the fourth of twelve children in a family that didn't have much money. The Partons lived in a small cabin in the Great Smoky Mountains, and life was not always easy. Dolly would later speak about her childhood with an affection that made it clear that poverty was never the only thing she remembered. She remembered music, she remembered family, and would tell the world stories from her childhood.

From a very young age, Dolly was a dreamer, and music found Dolly early on in her life. She began writing songs as a child, turning the things she saw around her and her experiences into stories.
She was already performing publicly before she was a teenager, and by the time she was 18, she had left home for Nashville with the kind of determination that would eventually define her entire career. Nashville wasn't waiting for Dolly Parton to become a star, and Dolly was determined to make it happen anyway. Her early career brought her into the orbit of Porter Wagoner, whose television show helped introduce her to a much larger audience, but even then, there was always something about Dolly that suggested she was never going to be content standing in someone else's shadow. She had too many songs inside her and too much ambition to remain simply a supporting character in someone else's story.

Eventually, she stepped out on her own, and the world learned what Dolly was capable of and then some. She wrote songs that seemed deceptively simple until you realized how much humanity was packed inside them. "Coat of Many Colors" took a childhood memory and turned it into a story about dignity, love and the pride a mother can give her child even when she has almost nothing else. "Jolene" captured jealousy and desperation so vividly that the woman's name became instantly recognizable around the world. "9 to 5" took the frustration of working women and turned it into an anthem that still is just as iconic and relatable today as it was then.

Then there was "I Will Always Love You." Dolly wrote the song herself, and years later, Whitney Houston would transform it into one of the biggest songs in music history, introducing Dolly's songwriting to an entirely new generation in the process. That was Dolly's particular kind of magic, she could write something from the most personal corner of her own life and somehow make millions of other people feel like it belonged to them.

Her career expanded far beyond country music. She became a movie star, a television personality, a producer and a businesswoman. She could walk onto a film set and hold her own alongside some of Hollywood's biggest names. She could step onto a stage and command an audience, and she could turn a business venture in the Smoky Mountains into Dollywood, a place that became both a major attraction and a tribute to the community that raised her. Somewhere underneath the rhinestones, the success and the fame, Dolly remained connected to that little girl from Tennessee, and perhaps that is the most important part of her story. Dolly never seemed to believe that becoming successful meant leaving your past behind, she carried hers with her.

She carried the lessons of growing up without much. She carried her love for her family. She carried her Appalachian roots, and she carried with her an understanding of what it meant to need something you couldn't necessarily afford. That understanding eventually became one of the greatest forces of her life.

Dolly had already become extraordinarily successful when she began looking for ways to give that success away. In 1995, she created the Imagination Library, initially in the county where she grew up.
The idea was deeply personal. Dolly's father had never learned to read or write, and she wanted children to have access to something she believed could change the trajectory of their lives: books.
What started as a small hometown effort grew far beyond Tennessee. Millions upon millions of children would eventually receive books through the program, free of charge, simply because Dolly Parton believed that a child should have the opportunity to discover the world through reading, and there is something particularly beautiful about that choice.

Dolly could have built her legacy entirely around the things that made her famous, instead, she spent part of it putting books into the hands of children who would never know her personally, and she didn't
stop there. When wildfires devastated the Tennessee community she came from in 2016, Dolly responded in the way she always seemed to respond when people needed help: she showed up. Through the
My People Fund, families who had lost their homes received direct financial assistance while they tried to rebuild their lives.

When medical researchers were working to understand COVID-19 and develop a vaccine, Dolly donated $1 million to Vanderbilt University Medical Center, supporting research that became part of the work behind the Moderna vaccine. The stories of Dolly's generosity kept accumulating, but what makes them meaningful isn't simply the amount of money she gave, it's the pattern behind them.

She remembered what it felt like to have less, so when she had more, she shared it. That may be the clearest thread running through Dolly's entire life. She never seemed interested in being rich simply for the sake of being rich. She wanted to build things. She wanted to create things. She wanted to make things better, and she wanted other people to have a chance. That is why Dolly's legacy feels so much bigger than music. Yes, she gave us songs that will probably be played forever. She gave us films that became part of people's childhoods and family traditions, and she gave us performances, characters, jokes and stories that became cultural touchstones.

But Dolly also gave children books, she gave families help when they had lost everything, she gave money to medical research, she gave opportunities to people who needed them. Most importantly, she gave people an example of what it can look like to become successful without becoming disconnected from the people you came from, and that is why Dolly never felt like just another celebrity. She was there for everyone, she was there for the entire world.

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There was a strange kind of intimacy to Dolly's fame, you could be someone who had never met her and still feel like you knew her. You could hear her voice and recognize it immediately, you could hear one of her songs and be transported to a particular time in your life, you could watch her tell a story and feel like you were sitting across from her. She was a superstar who somehow never stopped feeling like a person, and maybe that is why so many people are grieving her as though they've lost someone they actually knew.

Not many celebrity deaths have hit me this hard. I think part of that is because Dolly was never simply a celebrity in my mind, she was part of the world I grew up in. She created such a bright and welcoming world to so many, even if you didn’t come from the same place she did, and no matter how different you were from her, she seemed to love everything and every person the same.

Dolly was proof that being famous didn't have to mean becoming cold or distant. Dolly was allowed to be enormous, she wore the big hair, her bright flashy rhinestones, and shehe embraced the jokes and gossip about her appearance and differences. She became one of the most recognizable women on Earth, and she always made it known how proud she was to stand out, to be herself, and to be different. Underneath all of that was a person who never seemed embarrassed by where she came from, she celebrated it, she built a business there. She turned all of her experiences there into music, she helped the people in her hometown, and then she took everything she learned from that little corner of Tennessee and carried it out into the world.

There will never be another Dolly Parton, there can't be. There can't be another person with that exact voice, that exact sense of humor, that exact combination of ambition and humility, or that same ability to make an entire world feel personally connected to her, but perhaps the most comforting thing about Dolly's life is that so much of what she created doesn't disappear simply because she did.

A child can still open one of her books, an aspiring singer can still discover her music, someone who has never heard her story can still hear about the little girl from Tennessee who dreamed bigger than anyone expected her to, and somebody, somewhere, will hear Dolly's voice and decide that maybe they can dream a little bigger, too. That is what a legacy is supposed to do, it keeps pushing forward, even when the holder of that legacy is no longer physically here with us anymore.

I feel incredibly grateful to have existed in a world that Dolly Parton existed in; grateful that I grew up listening to her, watching her and being inspired by her. I feel incredibly lucky that I got to witness a woman who could become one of the biggest entertainers in history and still make kindness feel like one of her greatest accomplishments.

Dolly Parton was one of one.

She was a girl from the mountains who became a global icon, but she never stopped looking back at the mountains. She became enormously successful, but she never stopped reaching her hand back to people who needed one. Dolly spent her life writing stories, and in the end, she became one herself, a story about a little girl who didn't have much, dreamed anyway, worked for everything she wanted, made the world sing along with her and then spent decades making sure that the things she earned could help somebody else.

No amount of words could ever do justice to the amount of light, good, and just life Dolly breathed into this world. Her story is bigger than her hair, and more iconic than every sparkle she’s ever worn, and what a beautiful story it was.

Rest easy, Dolly.

Thank you for the music, the laughter, the stories and the dreams. Thank you for giving so much of your heart to the world, and thank you for reminding all of us that sometimes the greatest thing you can do with a life that has given you so much is give something back.

We will always love you.