Dolly Rebecca Parton Dean: A Remembrance
With gratitude to an amazing lady, and some change-lesson harvesting
We have truly lost a great light in the world yesterday with the passing of Dolly Parton, a woman so wonderful that despite being beautiful, smart, funny, talented and successful, it is how nice and generous she was that will garner the most real estate in the tributes about her. Someone who came to be loved and respected by EVERYONE.
I grew up a child of poverty myself, and Dolly was never just an entertainer to people like me. Dolly was the model, walking around in rhinestones and big hair, that you can carry your roots proudly instead of being ashamed of them, that you can live your life beautifully and faithfully to what matters most to you. We now all get to live in a slightly better world because of the courage she had to be every bit of her outstanding self.
I found myself thinking this morning about how, just how, did she manage to be Dolly in the first place? And what that can teach the rest of us?
I think about her as a young girl growing up in poverty, looking out at the world from a place that was small and a little scared, but also loved, and filled up with faith. (She was never to be pigeon-holed as just one thing). And I think about how she first encountered what would become the external Dolly, the larger than life persona, the bleach blonde, curvy gal the whole world would come to know. Dolly has told this story herself, that she fashioned her look after the town tramp, a woman her own mother called trash.
I imagine that moment did two things for a girl who was clearly smart and sensitive. First, she must have noticed how much attention that woman drew. Even if it was only subconscious, I think something in Dolly recognized that being looked at, being talked about, was exactly what a part of her wanted, the part that was going to grow up to be a performer. To be known, being seen at all as one of twelve children, was probably a very big deal. And second, I don’t think you can discard the glamour of it. In rural Tennessee, most of the women around her had lived hard lives, their look was probably more function over fashion. And here was this woman who stood out, who was beautiful in an extreme, unapologetic way. Something in Dolly was already comfortable being an outlier, being the extreme version of things. I think those two things together are what resonated with her most.
Picture again a slightly older Dolly, still unknown, still one of twelve children, still poor, still from rural Tennessee, putting herself in front of people for the first time as a performer. There was probably never more clucking of tongues and disparaging comments than in those early years. She was young and unknown, probably hadn’t yet fully cemented the glamour, but was already trying on “larger than life,”coming out on stage with all her guns a-blazing. I imagine that is when she started building the armor that would fit her for the rest of her life.
We talk about resistance as something that comes from within, and a lot of it does. We tell ourselves a thing can’t be done before anyone else gets the chance to tell us. But plenty of resistance comes from the outside world too, and Dolly inverted the whole premise of it. If you name the vulnerability yourself, the thing people are most likely to use against you, you take away all the ammunition. No one can lob it at you offhandedly once you have already said it, owned it, and turned it into a joke on your own terms.
So Dolly became the first one to make the dumb blonde jokes, pointing out that she was neither dumb nor blonde. She was the first to say the hair was a wig and the body wasn’t all natural. She’s the one who said it costs a lot of money to look this cheap, and when someone asked how long it took to do her hair, she said thank goodness she wasn’t there for it. She never pretended her look was anything other than exactly what it was - hers to design and explore - and that raw honesty is what disarmed people.
Underneath the jokes, perhaps was a niggling self-doubt, that a poor woman from rural Tennessee simply could not become a superstar. That kind of thing isn’t done. And her answer was to name that fear out loud too, and stand behind it anyway. This is my choice, this is my belief, this is my passion, and she never wavered on that.
But even holding that line, she did it with a light touch. Dolly was always willing to go soft, to let kindness and sweetness carry the day. She held firm in what she believed, but never in the way people might expect from someone standing her ground. She used to say she looked like a woman but thought like a man in business, and that contrast, exaggeratedly feminine by design and by choice, sweet and non threatening on the surface, while making every savvy business move, was a novel way to defy all expectation.
This was the bulk of what I talked about on my podcast episode about her earlier this year, the fact that Dolly never seemed to struggle with the thing so many of us struggle with, which is a persona that doesn’t quite match the person underneath. Before personal brand was even a concept, Dolly’s was rock solid. She was who she was. She was passionate about the community she came from, about helping children, about loving everybody, and she was universally kind before that was even a thing people talked about. There was no model for behaving that way then, and there still isn’t much of one now. She started out as the butt of jokes, and she was so unabashedly herself that eventually the entire world had to catch up to her, decades later. She never saw a difference between Dolly the Christian, Dolly the philanthropist, Dolly the sex symbol, and Dolly the country music superstar. To her it was one identity. Eventually it became one identity to the rest of us too.
But I imagine those decades had a cost. If people keep making the same jokes and picking at the same scab, and you keep deflecting with a cute line, there has to be a toll to paying for that. Listening to people talk about your body for decades, especially when you’ve gone to great lengths to alter that body, was surely was not always the most comfortable part of your life to have under a microscope for so long. I want to be clear that I’m surmising here. These aren’t conversations Dolly had publicly to the best of my knowledge. I have never (yet?) had plastic surgery myself, so I don’t know that psychology firsthand, and I’m sure it’s different for different people. But I can’t imagine an unrelenting focus on her body took no toll on her, when it seems to take a toll on most every person in this industry, and she was coming up at a time when there was none of the sensitivity around this that exists now. Nobody in her era would have said don’t talk about that woman’s body. Today, at least some people would.
I think that is part of what the strategy actually cost, and I think it’s also why the strategy needed something stronger underneath it than just being an artist who wanted to make music. Dolly was an artist who wanted to make music and use the proceeds to benefit her community and children. She had a real “why” behind what she was doing, one she seemed to have firmly in place at a remarkably young age. I know for myself, as someone who escaped poverty, I still struggle to take for granted the luxuries that people who have always had them seem to enjoy freely. I can’t just go on vacation as a free-spirit knowing I have family that are struggling financially. I believe there’s a term for this in other communities too, the idea that once you succeed, you carry the weight of taking care of everyone who didn’t get out with you. I wonder if Dolly carried some version of that as well?
I think there’s a final lesson here for all of us - beyond naming, owning and inverting the fear and shame. When you are tethered to your north star, fully anchored in your values, living a life that is honest and true to who you are, a nything becomes possible. And yes, it probably helps if you also happen to be stunningly beautiful, wildly talented, and blessed with an almost sixty year loving marriage, but that alone was never the whole story with Dolly. She defied the odds just by becoming a musical success in the first place, and that alone would be a remarkable story. But she built the Imagination Library. She built Dollywood. She gave scholarships to the children in her hometown. She expanded the opportunities across different countries. She took the royalties from Whitney Houston’s version of I Will Always Love You and quietly invested them back into a Black community in Nashville, without telling anyone, for decades. She is beyond remarkable in what she chose to do with her time, her money, and her talent.
I think there’s a reinforcing mechanism at work here, something like a circle that feeds itself. Being anchored in your values drives the confidence to wear the armor against whatever resistance the outside world throws at you. That armor gives you the ability to heal from the thousand paper cuts of people making the same jokes over and over, the ones you learn to tactfully disarm. And once you can set those aside, you can keep your eyes fixed on your actual goals, which lets you achieve them, which in turn reinforces the confidence, which makes it that much easier to casually cast aside the next nasty remark. Around and around it goes.
So I think the lesson is this: Be crystal clear on what you believe, and let that belief guide what you want to achieve. Have supreme faith in your ability to get there. Know your strengths, and build your armor around whatever the world might try to call a weakness instead. And don’t fear being different. Standing alone can be daunting, but it is also powerful, because it means you aren’t sharing the stage with anyone. When you find yourself standing alone because you are being guided by your values, and it feels a little lonely in that moment, try to relish it instead of shrinking from it. That is where the strength grows and reinforces you.
It is easy, looking at everything Dolly became, to work backwards and assume it was inevitable. Of course she accomplished all of that, we think, because we only ever meet her at the end, fully formed, already a legend. But the image I want to leave you with is not that woman. It is a much younger Dolly, a little clunky, maybe a bit over her skis, starting to position herself as larger than life when she was the only person in the room who could see it yet. That is the talisman worth holding onto in the moments when you feel overwhelmed, or afraid, or not quite up to the task, and you are searching for a little confidence of your own. Picture that young woman who believed so much in her own potential that she went on to exceed even her own expectations. I think that is the biggest lesson in all of this, bigger than any of the smaller ones along the way. Sometimes you have to borrow the faith in yourself that the youngest, most idealistic, most hopeful version of you once had without question. Wrap it around you tightly, keep your eyes locked on your own north star, and just start taking one step after another.
Originally published to Substack on August 26, 2026.
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