Fearless, Fabulous Dolly Parton and What We Can All Learn From Her: A Remembrance

When the news broke today that Dolly Parton had died, everyone in the Billboard newsroom from the most seasoned veteran to the college intern shed a tear — because it felt like, as one person said, “an angel had just died.” The world already feels like a colder place without her in it.

Everyone loved Dolly Parton because Dolly Parton honestly loved everyone. (Which is very different from liking everyone.) Parton felt like the one person on earth that everyone could agree was nothing but a universal good.

Groups who were famously at odds, such as conservative Christians and the LGBTQIA community, agreed on their love for Dolly.

Today she’s even being mourned by The Muppets .

Parton generally declined to talk politics or politically charged issues, but she very clearly made her strong opinions known, and the thread always led back to treating people with love and kindness.

She constantly stressed that she wasn’t here to judge; she’d leave that up to God.

But that doesn’t mean she played it safe.

Not in her words or in her music.

People weren’t writing songs about dying by suicide because they were pregnant in 1968 (or really now, 60 years later), but Parton was.

In “The Bridge,” a women jumped off a bridge where she and her lover had first kissed after he abandoned her when she became pregnant.

Even more heartbreaking is 1969’s “Down From Dover,” about a pregnant teen whose parents send her away and her baby dies while being born — because, the protagonist reckons, the baby knew the father was never coming back.

That one got banned from the radio. (By the today’s far right definition, she was “woke” — but not even the far right was ever going to cancel Dolly.) She had a unique blend of savvy and sensitivity, knowing when the right thing for her business was also just the right thing in general.

In 2018, she renamed her Dixie Stampede dinner attraction Dolly Parton’s Stampede because she became aware the word “Dixie” and its associations with the Confederacy could be hurtful to some.

“When they said ‘Dixie’ was an offensive word, I thought, ‘Well, I don’t want to offend anybody,” she told Billboard in a 2020 cover interview .