To Dolly
When my brothers and I were young, we had patterns, nothing obtrusive, just gentle patterns. They loved music. All kinds of music. They loved the gospel music of our black Baptist church, they loved Britney Spears. Every Saturday, they gathered into one of the bedrooms to watch country music together while our parents were downstairs watching sports. They watched The Porter Wagoner Show and the Grand Ole Opry.
Since they knew I liked Dolly, specifically, they’d call me when she came on. For years, the three of us would sit quietly as she sang “Coat of Many Colors” or “Jolene.” Her early songs, poignant memoirs about childhood in the mountains of East Tennessee, about family love and acceptance, resonated with tales my parents told of their childhoods on farms in Arkansas. Big families, little money, hard work, and funny stories were common denominators. Even in her pop-oriented phase after Nine to Five, she always remembered where she came from, as evidenced in “A Smoky Mountain Christmas,” a song turned into a sweet TV movie in 1986.
When I saw social media clips of her death, I thought (hoped, prayed) trolls were passing around yet another conspiracy theory. But they weren’t. Then came the outpouring of love from all sides of the country. While MCR doesn’t cover the already well-covered musical worlds of country and pop, it’s important that we recognize the passing of a person whose moral and musical influence spread far beyond her own genres well into what those genres known as the classical arts.
The latest Cheekwood exhibition, for example, was a flower-laden representation of characters from The Gilded Age, a HBO television series chronicling the US society in the late nineteenth century. It was presented by Fleurs de Villes, the same organization that had created a flamboyant floral image of Dolly herself at “Nashville North,” one of their earliest shows of note, produced for the 2024 Calgary Stampede in Ontario, Canada. Speaking to Karen Marshall, one of Fleurs de Villes’ co-founders, it was clear she couldn’t imagine Nashville or country music without Dolly.
Closer to home, the Nashville Ballet featured country musician Morgan Karr, also known as MORGXN as live music during their “Anthology” program. Dolly’s extravagant attire was surely reflected in his black suit with bright red floral sparkles, but also in his lovely voice, as I said at the time, “much like Dolly Parton or Alison Krauss, or other Nashville cats with voices “clean as country
water.”
Also dreaming of Dolly was former NB dancer Mollie Sansone, who choreographed “Wild Swans” in 2023. Appointed a resident choreographer in 2022, Sansone’s dream of constructing a ballet with Dolly’s music surfaced in an interview we did on YouTube.
And just this summer, the Nashville Symphony featured several performances of “Dolly Parton’s Threads: My Songs in Symphony.” This presentation with live music and video narration by Dolly herself featured new orchestrations of her meaningful repertoire.
Yes, Dolly Parton was a force of nature in arts of many colors, but it’s important to note that her multi-faceted, far-reaching artistic influence was about more than performing arts. She promoted literacy with her Imagination Library, now spread across the country. Meanwhile, she used her wealth to fund research to heal children.
She even promoted economic growth in the historically poor region of her birth through the creation of Dollywood, including theatrical entertainment among the rides and games. And when alerted to the fact that her shows representing the Confederacy could be offensive, she changed the shows, not out of kowtowing to public opinion, but out of kindness. And this one thing, kindness, was one of her major attributes, equal in quantity and quality to her talent. “It’s not my job to judge,” she once said, “that’s God’s job.”
Dolly Parton embodied the idea of loving thy neighbor as thyself. With her clear self-knowledge (“I figured people would eventually see that I had talent”) and quick wit (“I don’t care if they think I’m a dumb blonde. I know that I’m not dumb and I know I’m not a blonde”) she kept her musical gifts and humble ego in service to her community, a worldwide community of those who will always love her and her music.
Requiescat in pace, Dolly.
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Y Kendall is a Stanford-educated musicologist, specializing in dance history who recently earned an MFA in Creative Nonfiction at Columbia University, studying nonfiction writing with Ben Ratliff and Margo Jefferson. Kendall’s diverse works have been published in Alchemy: Journal of Translation, Columbia Journal, Mitos Magazín, The Hunger Mountain Review, and The Salt Collective, among others. Born and raised in Tennessee, Kendall now lives near Nashville, freelancing as a flutist and writer, while caregiving for relatives.
