As with so many others I mourned the death of Dolly Parton, for the brashly vibrant lyrics and melodies, for her unapologetic rural roots and luminous sensibility, for being an icon for the country as well as ‘queen’ of country music, for unforgettable films, above all ‘9 to 5’ that brought joy while delivering a radical message affirming working women, for Dollywood, for dedicated philanthropy faithful to her spiritual background in the impoverished hills of rural Tennessee, culminating a life of off-camera decency, empathy, and passion. Her gifts of versatility was self-acknowledged by titling her memoir A Coat of Many Colors.
Without faltering, she told us, ‘be all that you can be.’ But not by relying on blind luck or some invisible hand that gives us guidance through life. Dolly Parton’s message was more personal: “Find out who you are, then do it with purpose.’ Her spontaneous non-judgmental acceptance of difference was an eloquent dialectical response to grassroots intolerance still rampant in Northern stereotype of the South..
With an illiterate sharecropper as her father and a loving mother who pushed her to be all she could be by nurturing her musical gifts, allowing Dolly to sing in public, and become a local performer by the age of ten. As a child Dolly lived among a loving, contented, yet struggling backwoods Tennessee family in a simple cottage without electricity or running water. She moved to urban Nashville to pursue a singing and songwriting career while still a teenager, but never lost pride in her rural roots.
All this, and more, is what led to the rechristening of Dolly Parton as an ‘earth angel.’ This helped make her death such a soul-scorching event for America at this dark time of migrant scapegoating, ICE torture and death centers, genocidal complicity, foreign warmongering, climate denialism and ecocidal governance, necrophiliac and narcissistic leadership, and new brands of civil war revivalism. This descent of the country into toxic forms of polarization is the opposite of what made the live and let live spirit of Dolly Parton’s country music and universal values so inspirational including for many whose sensibilities were formed by the rhythms of urban live.
Although Dolly Parton thought with her dreams, existential America’s reality while not then a ceaseless nightmare still had far to go, but at least until recently seemed mostly to do better by stages at home and in the world. True, America continued to resist clarifying its mythic beginnings as the shining city on the hill by an overdue embrace of historical truthtelling. Rather than being refugees from European persecution America from its beginning was the birthplace afflicted by hubris and hypocrisy. The lionized founders of the republic were educated male patricians. Their legacy is falsely glorified as ‘the home of the free, and the land of the brave.’ It extended its nation-building by the coercive seizure of the land and birthright homeland identities and inherent rights of native Americans and further corrupted by a dependence in large parts of the federal republic on slave labor and on abused immigrant workers to build its economic powerhouse, an industrial powerhouse no longer able to cope with its technological creativity.
Dolly Parton’s death for me is not only a time of grief and remembrance but also an occasion of reflection on what this country has become and is becoming, with a growing awareness here and everywhere that it menaces humanity’s future, including its own. Not a time to sit back while celebrating the legacies of our national earth angels without recollecting tactics of resistance and emancipatory visions of revolution.
In this spirit, Dolly Parton’s life is resonant with her humanity and inclusiveness when it comes to personal identity, human rights, and choices of lifestyle. We can best honor her passing by heeding her life as well as by being thrilled anew by her many great songs of love, unity, equity, and sheer joy. It could become a potent fertilizer and symbolic stimulus for a better national and human future that now seems so elusive throughout the land. This celebration of the phenomenon of Dolly Parton can thus become more than a sentimental remembrance, but also a teaching moment of lasting significance.
