08/25/26
Title
"Find out who you are and do it on purpose."
-via Billboard, The Independent, People
This is going to be a different episode. Not even an episode at all really. Because I don’t really know how to tell you the news, when the news also includes this – Dolly Parton, the singer, songwriter, actress, businesswoman, and philanthropist, who actively, truly, put more good into this world than bad, died on Tuesday.
She was 80.
No one can properly sum up the life of Dolly Parton.
How do you sum up the philanthropy of a woman whose family was so poor that when she was born, her paid the doctor with a sack of cornmeal, she grew up without electricity or running water in their small, one-room log cabin, and, as the 4th of 12 children, she and her siblings slept multiple children to a bed and occasionally wore clothes sewn from empty flour sacks. And from that, when she did get money, she gave away more than we’ll ever know. Including:
More than 300 million books through Dollywood’s Imagination Library.
$1 million Vanderbilt University Medical Center in an effort that led to the development of the Covid-19.
Millions to children’s hospitals
$1,000 per month for six months to families who lost their homes to fires in 2016; for a total of $12.5 million.
$2 million to flood victims affected by Hurricane Helene in East Tennessee.
A bald eagle sanctuary at Dollywood, a 30,000 square foot aviary that shelters the largest collection of “non-releasable” bald eagles
For years, she gave $500 to every seventh and eighth grader who finished high school in her home county of Sevier County, Tennessee. She did it to see the high school rate drop. It did - from 35 percent to just 6 percent.
In 2022, she announced than anyone working at Dollywood would have 100% of college tuition covered. Even part time and seasonal employees.
And that’s not all of it. That’s just… PART.
When she was awarded an honorary Oscar for her humanitarian work, in part of her speech she said: “It makes me want to dream up new ways to help lift people up. Isn’t that what we’re supposed to be here for?”
How do you sum up the career of a woman who, on the same night, wrote "Jolene" and "I Will Always Love You" just a few days apart?
Who used some of the royalties from Whitney Houston’s cover of “I Will Always Love You" to build an office complex in a Black neighborhood in Nashville, Tennessee. Saying, "It was mostly just Black families and people that lived around there. It was a whole strip mall. And I thought, 'This is the perfect place for me to be, considering it was Whitney.'"
Adding, “This is the house that Whitney built."
In all, she wrote more than 3,000 songs.
She’s also been in 12 movies, had more than 400 television appearances, won 11 Grammy Awards (including a 2011 Lifetime Achievement Award), 10 Country Music Association Awards, and 13 Academy of Country Music Awards.
She was inducted into the Opry in 1969, the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1999, and in 2022 when she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame she asked them to take her name out because she didn’t have a rock album. She felt she hadn’t earned her spot.
Her name remained on the ballot, she was voted in, and the following year she put out Rockstar – a rock album.
She just loved working. She once said: "I always count my blessings more than I count my money. I don't work for money. Never did. It was the art."
There are so many ways to be a human in this world.
So many ways we’re given choices and so many ways we aren’t.
Dolly was born into abject poverty. Looking at the stats of a very poor, rural Appalachian girl with an illiterate father in the 60s, as she was, she only had a 40-50% chance of even graduating high school.
But she did.
She was the first in her family to do it and she left for Nashville the next day.
She had a lot of great quotes, including this one: "Find out who you are and do it on purpose."
We can leave this world better than we found it. That was the choice she made. And yes, the high net worth helps. But that’s not all of it. There are a lot of people, far too many people, with high net worths who are choosing to make life worse for people.
You can choose to be a good person. To make life better for others. To leave this place better than you found it.
In all aspects of her life, that’s exactly what she did.
And 80 years wasn’t enough.
160 years couldn’t have been enough.
The world was better because she was here and it might be less shiny for a little while, but it’s hard for me to say it’ll be worse without her. Because she was still here. She did the things she did while she was here. And her legacy, the good she did, the art she gave us, will continue on forever.
And so of course I want to give her the last word. And I really looked, and I found so many good ones:
“If you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain.”
“Storms make trees take deeper roots.”
“We cannot direct the wind, but we can adjust the sails.”
“People always ask me how long it takes to do my hair. I don’t know, I’m never there.”
“I was the first woman to burn my bra - it took the fire department four days to put it out.”
But really is was part of this one quote, “Wouldn't it be something if we could have things we love in abundance without their losing that special attraction the want of them held for us.” That felt the most appropriate:
“Wouldn't it be something if we could have things we love in abundance”
….I’m proud of you.