AA Edit | Goodbye, Queen of the American South
Singer-songwriter leaves behind a six-decade legacy of hits, acting and humanitarian work
A vibrant voice with deep emotion has fallen silent. Dolly Parton, diva of country music, has left the stage. The microphone has been muted.
Having dished out dozens of chartbusters in her lengthy career, during which she composed more than 3,000 songs, the US singer-songwriter breathed her last at 80. Aptly so, since it was in the 1980s that she commanded a broader international audience, even as she began her career early, in the 60s.
Growing up as the fourth child in a large family with 12 siblings, Dolly saw poverty from close quarters and wrote about it in quite a few of her songs. ‘Coat of Many Colours’, which deals with a jacket her mother stitched out of rags for her, best describes her home situation with lines that go: “Although we had no money, I was rich as I could be; in my coat of many colours, my mama made for me.”
‘Jolene’ is another of Dolly’s tearjerkers in which she makes an emotional appeal to another woman to keep away from her man while earnestly praising her rival’s looks with which she admits she can’t compete. Then there is the soulful ‘I Will Always Love You’ that Whitney Houston took to another level altogether, literally. To go with her coat of many colours, Dolly wore many hats as well. She also acted in a few movies, earning nominations for awards.
On the philanthropic side, Dolly founded the non-profit Dollywood Foundation in 1988 to improve educational outcomes among children in her home county of Sevier in Tennessee (USA). She also founded the Imagination Library, in honour of her illiterate father. She also worked to raise money for other causes, including the American Red Cross and HIV/AIDS-related charities and made generous donations to children’s hospitals.
In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, Dolly donated $1 million towards research at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Tennessee which funded the early stages of development of the Moderna vaccine. And when she was vaccinated in 2021 at the same university, Dolly injected humour by labelling social media accounts of the occasion “Dolly gets a dose of her own medicine.”
Such was her following that she once secretly entered a Dolly Parton lookalike contest... and lost! Let’s celebrate Dolly’s life that was well-lived. If Little Richard were alive today, he might have made us swing to ‘Good Golly Miss Dolly...’