My phone has been buzzing continuously, full of text threads looking less like group chats and more like collective grieving parlors. Everyone who knows me knows how deeply, Dolly Parton lived in the bloodlines of my house growing up. Losing her feels like someone knocked out the central load-bearing pillar of Southern grace and left the rest of us standing in the dust wondering how to hold the roof up.
I have spent the last few days mentally sitting back down on the cold linoleum of our childhood basement floor. Upstairs, the needle would drop on Dad’s prized “hifi” (his word, sacred and unalterable), and “Islands in the Stream” would filter down through the floorboards like warm syrup. That song became kind of an anthem around our house. Later I sang it on pontoon boats in the summer, and I belted it at friends’ weddings after two glasses of wine and a Champagne toast.
Every December, while wrestling tangled strands of lights onto a pine tree, my sister and I would harmonize to “Hard Candy Christmas” with the absolute theatrical drama only young Southern girls can pull off.
Then came our 80s home video era. We had a Beta disk of “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas” that saw more action than a small-town party line. My sister and I didn’t have the foggiest idea what the plot was actually about, but we could recite every line of “a little bitty pissant country place… nothing too high toned.” When Dolly would sang “I Will Always Love You” to Burt Reynolds under those golden lights, our living room went dead silent.
Later, the Beta gave way to a heavily worn VHS copy of “Steel Magnolias.” Dolly as Truvy was less an acting performance and more a holy masterclass in wisdom, hairspray, and heart. I practically raised myself on Truvyisms, throwing them around like confetti at every family gathering:
“Laughter through tears is my favorite emotion.”
“Time marches on and eventually you realize it is marchin’ across your face.”
“There is no such thing as natural beauty.”
“In a good shoe, I wear a size six, but a seven feels so good, I buy a size eight.”
And my personal favorite for any room with bad lighting or worse company: “There’s so much static electricity in this room, I pick up everything but boys and money.”
By the time I landed at UGA, Dolly was fully baked into my daily identity. My freshman roommate at Brumby Hall wanted to strangle me because every single morning, “9 to 5” blasted from my speakers as my non-negotiable wake-up alarm. Decades later, when I stepped onto keynotes and conference stages across the country, I refused the canned corporate entrance tracks. I demanded “9 to 5” as my walk-up song. If you want to walk into a room of suits feeling ten feet tall in heels, you let Dolly play you in.
Dolly Parton achieved the impossible feat of being entirely larger than life while staying completely grounded in East Tennessee dirt. She was spectacular without a drop of arrogance, fiercely clever without a shred of malice. Losing her hurts in that sharp, deep place reserved for people who made the world feel safer and kinder just by existing in it.
The notifications keep coming in, a steady stream of folks remembering the woman who gave away millions of books to kids as freely as she wrote timeless classics on grease-stained napkins. If we owe her anything as we process this loss, it is to carry that relentless, big-hearted kindness forward into a world that needs it now more than ever.