Remembering Dolly Parton …1946 – 2026

She felt like one of those people who would always be here.

Maybe that’s what happens to true icons. They become so woven into the cultural conversations and the fabric of who we are… the songs, the sayings, the glitz and glamor, the laughter… that we somehow forget there was ever a world without them.

My connection to Dolly Parton has always run a little deeper than the music alone.

Although, for the record, give me a glass of French white wine, a karaoke microphone, and cue Islands in the Stream, and apparently, I lose all self-control, or rather, awareness. I once sang a completely off-key solo in front of an entire horse crowd at the JW Marriott Turnberry in Miami, Florida. Even with Kenny Rogers noticeably absent…. I carried on.

I have always admired Dolly’s refusal to conform.

She created herself unapologetically, extravagantly, and completely on her own terms. She seemed to understand something that can take many of us a lifetime to learn: you don’t have to become less yourself…or lose your sparkle…to make other people comfortable.

There were the hair, the heels, and the wonderfully extravagant clothes, but beneath it all was an extraordinarily gifted songwriter, storyteller, businesswoman, and philanthropist who never seemed particularly interested in being confined to anyone else’s definition of who she should be.

That has always spoken to me.

In November 2023, during what I came to think of as one of my many solitude walkabouts, I was driving alone through the South in my rental, which I named Chrissy the Chrysler. I had been through the Carolinas, had just left Savannah, Georgia, and was headed to Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, to visit Dollywood. I contacted their media department because I wanted to write about women and philanthropy, specifically about a woman whose influence had fascinated me for years.

What I found at her high-energy theme park felt remarkably true to the woman herself.

Dollywood is pure joy, and Dolly was pure joy!!

It was in the people who worked there, in the music, in the rides, in the families wandering through the park, and in the laughter and unabashed celebration of where she came from. Nothing about it was ego-driven or performative. It felt warm, generous, and deeply human …a place built not simply around a celebrity but around an ethos.

That stayed with me.

At the time I wrote:

“Dolly Parton is a musical icon and trailblazer for women. Her challenge of societal gender norms and efforts to break through various constructs have always inspired me… She is a woman who has trusted her heart and connected with the greater world community through her musical storytelling genius.”

That visit ultimately became something more personal.

Through the S.H.E. Foundation, I donated 100 copies of S.H.E. Share Heal Empower, Collected Journeys, Volumes One, Two, and Three to The Dollywood Foundation and Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library. It was a small gesture compared with the enormous legacy Dolly created, but it mattered deeply to me.

What I have always shared with her — at least in aspiration — is a belief in the power of storytelling. Stories can connect strangers. They can make someone feel less alone. They can challenge what we have been told about who we are supposed to be. And sometimes, if we are lucky, they can help us find our way back to ourselves.

That solo drive in 2023 was part of me doing exactly that. I was trying to hear myself again, to trust the inner voice I had too often overridden, and to understand what remained when I stopped performing versions of myself for everyone else.

And there I was, somewhere between Savannah and Pigeon Forge, heading toward a place created by a woman who had spent her entire life doing the opposite of disappearing.

During that same period, I borrowed one of Dolly’s expressions and wrote that I had decided to “put wings on my dreams.” I understand that sentence differently today than I did then. It isn’t simply about chasing dreams. It is about trusting yourself enough to have them in the first place.

Dolly did that magnificently.

She could be glamorous without mistaking glamour for substance. Funny without diminishing her intelligence. Successful without forgetting where she came from. Generous without making generosity a performance…and feminine without ever surrendering her power.

That combination was radical long before we had the vocabulary we have today for women refusing to shrink. Generations loved her. She gave people permission. Permission to be a little louder… a little stranger…a little more ambitious… and a little more generous. A little more ourselves, and yes, permission to grab the microphone and sing both Dolly’s and Kenny’s parts if the moment called for it.

I’ll forever be a fan.

Not simply of Dolly Parton, the icon, but of the woman who seemed to understand that the greatest thing any of us can become is unmistakably ourselves.

Dolly, somehow, I really thought you would always be here.  You became so woven into the soundtrack of my life, I forgot you were mortal.  

When I visited Dollywood in 2023, I raised a glass beneath your larger-than-life portrait.  At the time, it was simply a toast to a woman I had admired for decades.  Looking at that photograph now, it feels like more than that. 

To the woman who made being entirely yourself look not only possible, but joyful.

What a life.

What a storyteller.

What a light.

Cheers, Dolly, and thank you for being YOU!!