This Just In — The English had their Shakespeare. The Italians had DaVinci. We, thankfully, had Dolly.
Where other enormous figures in our pop culture achieved a similar spectacular level of stardom, Dolly Parton did so much more. Elvis, Prince and Michael Jackson built musical empires and left behind huge sprawling estates worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Dolly spanned a longer career, and left behind a vapor trail of goodness, generosity and too many life lessons to list.
Unlike the other three, there was no controversy swirling around her passing. By her own admission, Dolly neglected her own health to take care of her husband at the end of his life, an unfortunately common phenomenon among family care-givers.
There is no doubt that Dolly’s passing has jolted Americans into remembering a vital thing about ourselves that we are sometimes distracted away from. We value goodness and generosity. We appreciate people who look to children as the promise of our future and seek to protect and nurture them. We know that these things are above — far above — our political differences, and they’re much more important.
After just one day of the news cycle being flooded with the shock and sadness of Dolly’s passing, America’s leading narcissist found it necessary to do an interview where he said “Dolly really liked me.” Beyond the attention-seeking need to that statement, I was stuck by something else.
He’s right.
Dolly said repeatedly (and I believe her) that she loved everybody. She felt that her faith called her to do that and I accept that. Honestly, I think it’s much more than that. I think she was an individual so pure of heart that she found her way through life assuming the best in people and rarely being wrong. The key thing is … this did not stop her from standing up for herself and being a savvy businesswoman.
Dolly Parton performs in concert in Tokyo, July 30, 1979. (Photo via AP Photo/Tsugufumi Matsumoto.)
In the early 70’s when Elvis Presley wanted to record “I Will Always Love You” Dolly was excited. The song had already been a hit for her and she thought it would be gigantic if Elvis recorded it. She told her family. Everyone was thrilled.
Then she talked to Colonel Tom Parker, Elvis’s manager, and he said that Elvis would have to own 50% of the publishing rights to the song if he recorded it. Dolly didn’t do that — not with any song she’d written. So Elvis never recorded the iconic song and it was more than a decade before Whitney Houston did.
Dolly wasn’t a mega star in the early 70’s. She was known, but not like she is today. Elvis, on the other hand, was (by any measure) a superstar. As Dolly told this story over the years, it was never a David and Goliath story. It was just about knowing who she was and expressing genuine regret that Elvis didn’t record that beautiful song. Many artists have done so since then without demanding a 50% cut of the publishing rights.
Dolly reportedly made over $10 million from Whitney Houston’s recording of that song, and poured a huge chunk of it into an office property In a predominantly Black neighborhood in Tennessee, calling it “the house that Whitney built.”
That is generosity. That is human decency. In the coming weeks and months, as is the nature of these things, we will learn of many more acts of generosity that didn’t reach the public’s attention and we will come to know just how massive the estate is of this self-made American icon.
What we already know is that we will always love her.
Jean Bolduc is a freelance writer and is the author of “African Americans of Durham & Orange Counties: An Oral History” (History Press, 2016) and has served on Orange County’s Human Relations Commission, The Alliance of AIDS Services-Carolina, the Orange County Housing Authority Board of Commissioners, and the Orange County Schools’ Equity Task Force. She was a featured columnist and reporter for the Chapel Hill Herald and the News & Observer.
Readers can reach Jean via email – jean@penandinc.com and via Twitter @JeanBolduc
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