Dolly Parton’s philanthropy inspiration was her father who couldn’t read or write: ‘I saw how crippling that could be’

While it may not be adorned in rhinestones and diamonds, Dolly Parton’s name is now etched over the doors of the former East Tennessee Children’s Hospital in Knoxville, which earlier this year announced it would be named after the legendary country music star.

Parton, who hailed from Locust Ridge, Tennessee, worked for decades on behalf of kids and families in her home state and far beyond.

Her family announced Tuesday Parton has died.

She was 80.

The nonprofit pediatric facility, which has served the region for roughly 90 years, entered the partnership with Parton, and hospital leaders said would deepen its mission to treat every child “as one of our own.” For Parton, whose philanthropy long focused on children’s health, education, and opportunity, the renaming serves as a symbol of commitment that started at her own kitchen table growing up, watching her father, Robert Lee Parton, who never learned to read or write.

Parton’s philanthropic work largely focused on children’s needs; she donated millions of books to children locally and across the U.S.

For her immense philanthropic commitment, Parton earned the Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy in 2022, and recalled the inspiration behind it all.

“This actually started because my father could not read and write and I saw how crippling that could be,” Parton said during her Carnegie Medal acceptance speech.

“My dad was a very smart man.

And I often wondered what he could have done had he been able to read and write.

So that is the inspiration.” What started as a local literacy experiment grew into a global literacy engine.

The Imagination Library now operates in thousands of communities across the U.S., Canada, the UK, Ireland, and Australia, gifting more than 3 million books every month and mailing more than 270 million in total as of 2025.

The program recently marked a milestone of 200 million books donated, with Parton (who was worth an estimated $450 million by Forbes as of June 2025) calling the chance to help plant the “seeds” of children’s dreams in books “one of my greatest gifts in life.” Every book is free to families, no matter their income, a deliberate choice rooted in her desire to erase the stigma she saw shadowing her father.

“Daddy was a very smart man…but he was ashamed that he couldn’t read or write,” Parton told Oprah Winfrey in 2020.