Dolly Parton — The One Person America Could Agree On

Earlier this year, I was guest lecturing a roomful of Columbia MBA students. A group discussion about the role of the media was evolving into a debate over just how polarized America had become when one student interjected, cynically: “We just can’t seem to agree on anything!”

“Well,” I countered, pausing for effect, “I recently saw some data suggesting that there is, in fact, one person we can all agree on. Someone who, you might say, unites this great nation.”

Business school students, as it turns out, love a guessing game. Names were tossed around the room: Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Morgan Freeman. Eventually, a soft-spoken woman in the back row piped up.

“Is it Dolly Parton?” she ventured.

When I nodded, the room erupted into cheers. Aspiring bankers and consultants, would-be entrepreneurs, tech bros and retail nerds, spontaneously expressed their appreciation for the U.S. national treasure that is Dolly.

The YouGov poll to which I was referring, conducted in collaboration with UMass Lowell, had found that 68% of Americans viewed Dolly Parton favorably, while just 5% viewed her unfavorably — enough to put her at the top of a popularity contest featuring more than 20 international personalities, including Barack Obama and Volodymyr Zelenskyy. 

For a split second — before I reeled the students back into the lesson at hand — I couldn’t help but notice that the data I had cited was being corroborated right there, in this hyper-selective microcosm of a classroom. I had no doubt the same thing would happen in other classrooms — offices, homes, and bars — around the U.S. Who doesn’t like Dolly? 

On Tuesday, Aug. 25, Dolly Rebecca Parton died peacefully at the age of 80, in Nashville, Tenn., after a brief battle with cancer, her publicist confirmed. Last year, she postponed and then canceled a Las Vegas residency. After that, speculation and widespread concern about her health caused her to confirm that she wasn’t, in fact, “dead yet.”

Dolly was born in 1946 in Locust Ridge, Tenn., in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains — the fourth of 12 children. Her family was, in her own words, “dirt poor,” but music brought joy through the ups and downs of living in poverty. 

Dolly started performing as a young girl, first in the church where her grandfather preached, then on local radio and television. At the age of 13, in 1959, she performed on the Grand Ole Opry, a world-famous country music show. The day after she graduated from high school in 1964, she left for Nashville, globally known as “Music City.”

Given the Dolly many of us came to know — with the wigs and rhinestones, the gravity-defying boobs and the pithy one-liners, the movies, the theme parks and of course the unmistakable hourglass physique — it might be easy to forget what an extraordinary songwriter she was. 

She wrote hundreds of songs, from the desperate plea of “Jolene” to the autobiographical tenderness of “Coat of Many Colors” and the aching farewell of “I Will Always Love You.” The songs might seem deceptively simple, but they’re layered with lyrics bursting with the messiness of life: the devastation of poverty, the pulse of desire, the wretchedness of heartbreak and the perilousness of pride. That resonance helped her sell more than 100 million copies of her records worldwide.

Dolly’s first great break came alongside Porter Wagoner, a country star whose television show made her a familiar face and helped her secure a major recording contract with RCA. But Dolly was never just going to be somebody’s sidekick. “Jolene,” released in 1973, became one of the songs that helped her press her way into the music industry beyond the country scene. A few years later, “Here You Come Again” reinforced her crossover into the pop mainstream.

Meanwhile, in 1974, “I Will Always Love You,” written as a tribute to Wagoner, became a major hit. Almost two decades later, it became a fresh phenomenon when Whitney Houston recorded it. As part of the soundtrack to her 1992 film “The Bodyguard,” it broke sales records. When Houston won a Grammy for her performance in 1994, it was Dolly who presented it to her.

In an industry dominated by men, Dolly wrote her own songs, protected her music publishing rights, started her own publishing company, managed her money and understood earlier than most entertainers that an image could be both a joke and an asset. In a lineage of powerful women music artists, she was a trailblazer.

Pop stardom became Hollywood stardom. Dolly made her film debut opposite Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin in “9 to 5,” and later appeared in films including “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas” and “Steel Magnolias.” 

“Here You Come Again” earned Dolly her first Grammy; and two more followed with “9 to 5.” Eventually, she amassed 10 of the famous gongs — off the back of 55 nominations. In 2011, she received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. 

In 1999, Dolly was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame and, in 2022, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame — an honor she tried to turn down  because she did not think she had earned it.

Then came Dollywood, the theme park in the Smoky Mountains that she joined as a co-owner in 1986 and re-branded, turning the monument to her improbable ascent into an economic engine for the region that produced her.

Next up, Imagination Library, the literacy program she founded in 1995 in honor of her father, who could neither read nor write. What began as a project sending free books to children in her home county, grew into an international enterprise.

When a wildfire swept through the Great Smoky Mountains in 2016, Dolly hosted an all-star telethon and set up a foundation for residents whose homes were destroyed or damaged. In 2020, her generosity gained particular global attention, when she gave $1 million to Vanderbilt University Medical Center for Covid-19 research. The donation helped support work connected to the development of Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine. 

In a strange yet somehow entirely Dolly-ish turn of events, the woman who had already given the world “Jolene” and “I Will Always Love You” had also helped fund the scientific effort that saved an indeterminable number of lives. Is there anything this woman couldn’t do?

Dolly was a woman of apparent contradictions, who somehow made those contradictions compatible. She was gaudy, ostentatious and performative and also deeply sincere, extravagantly feminine and formidably tough. She was a devout Christian who was embraced wholly by generations of members of the LGBTQ+ community. 

Her appearance was an exercise in excess — the towering blonde bouffant, the impossible heels, rhinestones enough to light up a small city — but she was forever puncturing the spectacle with jokes at her own expense. “It costs a lot of money to look this cheap,” she once quipped. Another time she ridiculed her own penchant for a good wig: “People always ask me how long it takes to do my hair. I don’t know, I’m never there.”

Behind the jokes, though, was a woman who knew what she was worth; behind the exaggerated femininity was someone who maintained extraordinary control over a career spanning seven decades. 

And then there’s politics.

In an age in which nearly every aspect of American culture seems to have become an invitation to choose a side, Dolly appeared to gracefully decline those invitations. Sure, she had opinions, but she resisted becoming a political mascot or pawn. She attracted rural and urban fans, conservatives and liberals, churchgoers and drag queens, nostalgic grandparents and their enthusiastic grandchildren who discovered Dolly through Miley Cyrus. (Miley was Dolly’s goddaughter and led tributes to her on Tuesday after her passing.) 

During bitter election years, “Dolly for President” shirts became a kind of joke that wasn’t actually all that funny considering how popular she might have been had she actually chosen that path.

Her refusal to be politically pegged might be interpreted as shrewd strategic acumen — an unwillingness to alienate a section of her fanbase, but I don’t buy that. To me, it seems Dolly simply wanted to allow people to see themselves in her without insisting that everyone see the world as she did. 

She could be proudly Appalachian without turning that pride into grievance or victimhood; proudly Christian without making faith a weapon; undeniably wealthy without losing sight of the poverty from which she came; unabashedly glamorous while laughing harder at herself than almost anyone else. “Mother Goose, Cinderella, and the local hooker,” was how she once described her look. 

For all the songs she wrote, the characters she played, the books she donated, the money she raised, the rhinestones she wore, she gave us something that today feels so achingly rare: a little patch of common ground.

And that’s exactly what I saw when I was at Columbia Business School that day: When a roomful of ambitious, driven MBA students who almost always find something to disagree about, heard two words — Dolly Parton — nobody wanted to argue. At that moment, everybody just loved Dolly.