My View From the cheap seats

There are celebrities, there are stars, and then there are people who somehow become part of the American fabric.

Dolly Parton was one of those people.

She was an original. Nobody looked like Dolly, sounded like Dolly or quite carried herself like Dolly. The big hair, the rhinestones, the unmistakable voice, the songs, the humor — all of it was unmistakably hers. But beneath all the glitter was something even more remarkable, a genuine warmth that seemed to make just about everybody feel like they knew her.

Dolly could sing about heartbreak, write a song that became a country classic, star in a movie, build an entertainment empire and make us laugh at herself. She became famous without ever seeming to forget where she came from.

Maybe it was the voice. Maybe it was the laugh. Maybe it was the hair, which appeared to have its own zip code. Maybe it was the rhinestones. Or maybe it was because Dolly Parton never seemed embarrassed about being Dolly Parton.

She was, from the beginning, an original. You could imitate her voice. You could wear the clothes. You could pile your hair as high as a fire lookout tower. But you couldn’t duplicate Dolly. There was only one.

She came from the mountains of East Tennessee, one of 12 children, and turned a childhood of poverty into a career that included some of the most recognizable songs ever written, movies we still watch, a theme park and an entertainment empire. She wrote “Jolene.” She wrote “9 to 5.” She wrote “I Will Always Love You,” which became an even bigger hit when Whitney Houston recorded it. Dolly wrote thousands of songs, and somewhere along the way she became one of the most recognizable people on the planet.

But I think her greatest work may have had nothing to do with music. In 1995, Dolly started something called the Imagination Library in her home county. Her father had never learned to read or write, and Dolly wanted to give children something he never had — the chance to discover what a book could do. It started small. Then it grew. And grew. Today, the Imagination Library has given away more than 325 million free books to children in the United States and several other countries.

Think about that number for a minute. Three hundred twenty-five million books.

That is a lot of bedtime stories. A lot of children sitting cross-legged on the floor. A lot of parents reading one more story when they really ought to be turning out the light. And somewhere in all those homes, there is a child who may discover that books can take you some place you have never been. Dolly understood that.

She understood something else, too. Fame is temporary. Money is temporary. Hair is definitely temporary. But kindness can keep going. That’s why Dolly was so beloved.

She also knew how to laugh at herself. That may be one of the great secrets to her appeal. Dolly never took herself too seriously. She knew the joke about the hair. She knew the joke about the clothes. She knew the jokes about everything. And she laughed right along with us.

Dolly Parton became an American original. She gave us songs to sing, movies to watch, stories to remember and, through all those books, millions of reasons for children to dream.

There will never be another Dolly. And that’s probably just the way Dolly would have wanted it.