On the day Dolly Parton’s family announced her death, I attended the 10th anniversary celebration for Arts DuPage, a nonprofit that advocates for arts and culture in DuPage County. I had been invited to write and deliver the keynote address about the role that the arts play in keeping our communities thriving and connected.

The news of Parton’s death broke an hour before I was heading to the venue. My original speech, obviously, had to be tossed.

If you’re talking about the power and importance of the arts — particularly the arts as connective tissue — it's hard to imagine a stronger exemplar than Dolly Parton. She crossed generations. She crossed genres. She crossed political and cultural divides. She was a feminist icon, an LGBTQ ally, a rule-breaking, barrier-busting, chart-topping country music pioneer, a deep-pocketed philanthropist and still, above all, a treasured symbol of Americana.

She started with nothing; her father famously paid the Methodist missionary doctor who delivered her in 1946 with a sack of cornmeal. She was the fourth of 12 children, and they grew up without electricity or running water. Her 1971 song “Coat of Many Colors” (her favorite, she has said, of her more than 3,000) is about the winter coat her mother sewed for her from a box of fabric scraps.

At her time of Parton’s death, she was worth an estimated $650 million. Not that her value could be measured in dollars — in large part because she kept giving them away.

Her Imagination Library, which she launched in 1995 to put books in the hands of kids in Tennessee, has given away more than 300 million children’s books worldwide. She was inspired by her own father, who couldn’t read or write.

“I believe that if every kid grows up with a song in their heart and a book in their hand,” she wrote on Twitter in 2017, “there’s a pretty good chance that their dreams will come true.”

She treated her success like a dare. To do more, help more, imagine more.

A small example, but one that speaks volumes: When Whitney Houston’s gorgeous recording of Parton’s "I Will Always Love You" earned Parton an estimated $10 million in royalties in the ’90s, Parton turned around and invested a portion of the money into an office complex in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Nashville.

In 2020, she donated $1 million to COVID-19 research at Vanderbilt University. In 2024, she contributed $1 million to Hurricane Helene relief efforts in East Tennessee, home to her Dollywood amusement park. Her generous donations to children’s hospitals, conservation efforts, the Salvation Army, college scholarships and more earned her the Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy in 2022.

Art wasn’t decoration for Parton. Art was a force for good. Art narrated our lives and unlocked our humanity.

Which could, on the surface, seem like a contradiction. What were her rhinestones, her makeup, her giant chest, her tiny waist, her “higher the hair, the closer to God” wigs, if not decoration?

An homage. A tribute. A refusal to re-wrap what she gifted us into a more conventional, more palatable, more predictable package.

“Parton could’ve classed herself up decades ago, wearing less makeup as women who can afford it are given to doing, or singing something that doesn’t belong on the CD rack at Cracker Barrel,” Sarah Smarsh wrote in her 2020 book, “She Come By It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs.”

“Instead,” Smarsh wrote, “she built her image and wrote her songs so that she can’t sing or look in the mirror without representing women who go unheard and unvalidated every day.”

Parton acknowledges as much in 2008’s “Backwoods Barbie.”

“I've always been misunderstood because of how I look,” she sings. “Don't judge me by the cover, cause I'm a real good book. So read into it what you will, but see me as I am. The way I look is just a country girl’s idea of glam.”

A friend gave me a copy of “Dolly Parton In Her Own Words” for my birthday one year. It’s a collection of her quotes, organized by topic. (Philanthropy, songwriting, spirituality, and so on.) Her wisdom, her intellect and her heart are baked into all of them, and it’s difficult to choose a favorite. But a leading candidate is this:

“I’m not offended by all the dumb blonde jokes because I know I’m not dumb,” Parton said. “And I also know I’m not blonde.”

For 80 years, it was Dolly Parton’s world, and we were lucky, truly, to be living in it. She was a champion of children, a peerless talent, a giant-hearted humanitarian, an unwavering ally to marginalized folks, and completely uninterested in what you thought she ought to be doing instead.

She dared us to imagine. She dared us to care. She led us by example. And she took us someplace extraordinary.

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