‘She’s a mythological figure’: America mourns the one person everybody loved

Nashville: Ernie Samora left home in Denver just a month ago and moved to the capital of country music. Little did he know that Tennessee was about to lose its undisputed queen.

“Dolly was a bright light of kindness and generosity and empathy and understanding,” the 24-year-old says as he surveys the neon lights of Nashville’s Broadway.

“She made amazing music on top of that. I thought I knew a lot about Dolly, and I’ve learnt so much more about her today after her passing. People are just talking about all the good things she did.

“She’s like a mythological figure at this point. I fully believe she will go down with the likes of Elvis and Michael Jackson.”

We are standing in the shadow of Dolly Parton’s SongTeller Hotel, a new addition to downtown Nashville which includes a museum of all things Dolly, and is due to welcome its first guests next month.

Only a few days ago, Parton told People magazine how proud she was of the project. She acknowledged a few lingering health issues. On Tuesday, just a few blocks away at the Vanderbilt hospital, she died. She was 80 .

Nashville’s famous country music strip was bursting with spontaneous Dolly joy on Tuesday night, with bands plucking a song or two from her bulging songbook, or taking requests from eager crowds.

At Doc Holliday’s Saloon, Jonny and Matt performed Jolene. Somewhere in the din, somebody was doing a karaoke version of I Will Always Love You . At Miranda Lambert’s Casa Rosa, a young woman named Ashley Christensen sang 9 to 5 . “I heard that was part of a movie. Steel Magnolias , right?” she said afterwards. The crowd cried out: “No!”

While Parton was ill with cancer, her death still came as a shock. Tuesday night’s tributes were improvised; outside the historic Tootsies Orchid Lounge, someone had pinned a cardboard sign to the purple brick wall.

“We will always [heart] Dolly,” it said. “It’s hard to be a diamond in a rhinestone world.”

Across the road at AJ’s Good Time Bar, bartender Amanda Taylor jumped on stage to perform Islands in the Stream . Further away at the iconic Grand Ole Opry, bluegrass singer-songwriter Rhonda Vincent threw out the script and opened the evening with Coat of Many Colours , plus more of Parton’s songs later in the night.

“Really, she’s more than a legend, she’s an icon,” Taylor told this masthead after her song. “And I think she is pretty much the only one left that universally everybody just loves. Nobody has a bad word, nobody’s divisive about it – everybody just loves her.”

From Nashville to Washington, Americans feel as though they have lost one of the last pieces of the national fabric that bound everybody together. To say that Dolly Parton was universally beloved is no understatement – and in present-day America, that’s a rare thing.

She was mourned by Donald Trump and the Democratic Socialists of America alike. Nathan McDermott, a New York-based journalist, posted their tributes side by side on X and said: “We probably won’t ever see anything like this for the rest of our lives.”