2 September 2026

The mystery of Dolly Parton

Was she the messiah? Maybe

Photo by Ira Berger

When Donald Trump lowered the flag at the White House for Dolly Parton – ordered for a whole week – following her death on 25 August at the age of 80, it was the first thing he had got right as president. Because if the making of America was its value as a cultural export, Dolly was a key fixture in the latter part of that project – and when we lost her, we lost a piece of the American Dream.

Parton was an apolitical politician: a benevolent Christian populist who made kindness and charity the core of her message – a simple New Testament creed. Was she the messiah? Maybe, though she lacked Jesus’s righteous anger. (It was starting to come through on the rock album Rockstar, released in 2023.)

Like a good version of Jeff Bezos, who once gave her $100m to distribute as she wished, Parton knew that the right thing to do if you found yourself heading towards the billionaire bracket was to philanthropise your way back out of it. You could donate a million dollars to develop the Moderna Covid vaccine, say, like she did in April 2020. Ideally, the Doligarch would have had another 80 years in which to do good works.

Yet, generosity was also the core of the music. I think it’s the key to why people liked her so much, unconscious as the reasons for such liking often are. Songwriting is full of solipsism, uncomfortable feeling and wars fought with words – but Parton was different. “I Will Always Love You” is a very fair sentiment aimed at someone who, between the lines, can’t be bothered with her – and “Here He Comes Again” is a very reasonable portrait of a toxic man. No one at all, meanwhile, is blamed in the incomparable “Jolene”.

I have always heard desire in that repeated lyric for the flame-haired bank clerk who inspired it. Dolly’s romantic life was wrapped in mystery like her arms were rumoured to be wrapped in tattoos. Her husband of 59 years, Carl Thomas Dean, was barely seen in his final four decades, until his death in 2025.

The main message of her music was feminism, a simple message on the surface – you can be “loose” but not aggressive or rude – but latterly described as “proto third wave”. Around the same time Barbara Walters attempted to make the singer look ridiculous in her famous late-Seventies interview, Dolly formed a supergroup with Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstadt. It was a truly radical act in a world that liked to make out there was only room for one Country Queen at a time. If people were mean, Dolly didn’t retaliate – she smiled and restated her strengths. That twinkly magnanimity entered the songwriting and elevated it, somehow, out of her genre: people who didn’t like country liked Dolly, and people who didn’t like her corny side could turn a blind eye to “Me and Little Andy”.

She is perhaps the only example I can think of in which a singer’s offstage personality – at least, the one they chose to present to the world – could not be split from their music; where the way she smiled, the jokes she cracked, and even her personal brand of socially minded capitalism could be felt in the songs she wrote.

There was something reassuring about Parton that was at odds with our idea of fame and what it does to people. Ironically, that quality – the self-deprecation, the same stories told over and over – is what took her to the level of an icon. Her manner suggested that she was above it all, somehow; that nothing mattered too much, especially this music business, as long as you were decent enough and tried to do good things. My favourite quote of Parton’s is: “Find out who you are and then do it on purpose.”

In 2019, I visited her theme park, Dollywood, in the Smoky Mountains – it was the single largest source of her overall wealth. There are three things I remember in particular. The gift shops were quite high-end, with a lot of shabby chic. There was a scale mock-up of the one-bedroom shack in which she grew up, in Locust Ridge, Tennessee, with 11 brothers and sisters. And there was a rolling, on-the-hour performance of her songs played by members of her sprawling family, most of them in their sixties and seventies, slightly grim-faced, permanently employed in a state of gilded musical bondage. Parton had made plans for her estate for the next ten years and had a “legacy team” in place.

But now, these unsung cousins, whose bluegrass talents never made it out of the park, are our closest link to Dolly, and the little down-home show might take on a lustre all of its own.

[Further reading: Rachel Cusk’s Portmanteau novel]