Remembering Dolly Parton

I don't usually comment on popular culture or the news of the day, but I'm making an exception for Dolly Parton. She passed away yesterday at 80, and her life deserves a moment of recognition here, not because she was famous, but because of how she used that fame.

A Humble Beginning

Parton was born in 1946 in a one-room cabin in the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee, one of twelve children in a family with very little money. Her father worked the land to get by, and details from her childhood, patched clothing, meals stretched to feed a large family, became the material she later turned into songs like "Coat of Many Colors." She stayed open about where she started throughout her career, not to draw sympathy, but because it shaped how she saw success and what she chose to do with it.

A Career Spanning Six Decades

Parton built an enduring catalog, writing thousands of songs over more than six decades, including two of her most famous, "Jolene" and "I Will Always Love You," reportedly written on the same day. She won multiple Grammy Awards, earned a spot in the Country Music Hall of Fame, and crossed into film with roles like "9 to 5," proving her reach went well beyond country radio. She also built Dollywood in her home region of East Tennessee, turning it into one of the area's largest employers and a lasting source of local jobs.

A Legacy of Giving

In 1995, she started the Imagination Library, a program that mails a free book every month to enrolled children from birth to age five. What began in her home county in Tennessee grew into a program active across the United States and several other countries, and it has distributed more than 300 million books to children who might not have had one otherwise.

Generosity Beyond The Headlines

Her giving went beyond books. In 2020, she donated $1 million to Vanderbilt University Medical Center for infectious disease research, funding that contributed to the development of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine. Stories about her generosity toward crew members, employees, and people she'd never met circulated for years, often only becoming public because someone else chose to share them. She rarely publicized her own giving.

Dolly Parton spent a career being both enormously successful and consistently kind, two things that don't always go together. There's a popular phrase that says "In a world of X, be a Y". Well, put whatever you want in for X, and be a Dolly.

R.I.P. Dolly. We will always love you.

Jay Sexton is a finance instructor, doctoral candidate in Personal Financial Planning, and owner of Sexton Finance. He writes about the behavioral and emotional dimensions of financial decision-making at sextonfinance.com.