There are celebrities and there are icons. And then, somewhere above both of those categories, there is Dolly Parton, who has been doing something remarkable for six decades and making it look entirely effortless while doing it.
I have been thinking about what I want my daughters to absorb from watching a woman like that move through the world. Not the rhinestones (though the rhinestones are excellent). Not the voice (though the voice is one of the great instruments of the 20th century). Something underneath all of that. Here’s what I keep coming back to.
Know who you are and do not apologize for it.
Dolly Parton grew up in a one-room cabin in Locust Ridge, Tennessee, one of twelve children, and never pretended otherwise. She has been famous for longer than most of her fans have been alive and has remained, through all of it, recognizably herself. She never cleaned up her origin story, never distanced herself from her roots, never changed her accent or her style to match what the industry expected. She decided who she was early and has simply continued being that person at increasing volume for sixty years.
That is one of the most radical things a woman can do in public life.
I want my daughters to know: the version of you that the world might ask you to be quieter about is almost always the version worth keeping.
Take the work seriously. Take yourself lightly.
Dolly Parton wrote “I Will Always Love You” because she needed to leave her professional partnership with Porter Wagoner and did not know how to say goodbye. It became one of the most recorded songs in American music history. She wrote “Jolene” in a single sitting. She has written over 3,000 songs.
And she is funny. Consistently, warmly, disarmingly funny. She makes jokes about her appearance with a specificity that suggests she is entirely in on it. She does not confuse taking her craft seriously with taking herself too seriously. The two are not the same thing, and she has always known the difference.
I want my daughters to work hard enough to produce something real, and to hold themselves loosely enough to laugh at the whole enterprise.
Be kind in a way that costs you something.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Dolly Parton donated one million dollars to Vanderbilt University’s research fund, which contributed to the development of the Moderna vaccine. She did not make a press conference about it. She did not use it to negotiate anything. She simply wrote a check and later, when the vaccine was named, gently declined to have it named after her.
She also established the Imagination Library in 1995, which has now mailed over 200 million free books to children from birth to age five around the world. This is a woman who grew up unable to afford books and quietly spent decades ensuring that other children would not face the same lack. In Tennessee alone, 85 percent of eligible children are enrolled in the program.
This is not charity as branding. This is someone using what they have to fill a gap they once lived in.
I want my daughters to give in a way that requires something from them. Not from surplus, but from the thing they actually care about most.
Do not let anyone else decide what you deserve.
When Elvis Presley wanted to record “I Will Always Love You,” his manager, Colonel Tom Parker, told Dolly she would have to sign over half the publishing rights. She refused. She turned down Elvis Presley. She knew what the song was worth and she held her ground and the publishing rights she kept have earned her more than any deal she might have accepted.
I want my daughters to know what they bring to any room they walk into. To negotiate from that knowledge. To be willing to walk away when the terms are wrong, even when walking away is hard, even when the other side of the table is very impressive.
Your joy is not frivolous.
Dolly Parton loves sequins. She loves big hair. She loves sparkle and color and the full theatrical production of her own appearance. She has never once suggested that this is in tension with her intelligence, her craft, her philanthropic work, or her depth as a human being. She simply contains all of it, cheerfully and simultaneously.
The world will tell girls, in a hundred subtle ways, that the things they love most unseriously are the things they should be most embarrassed about. That glitter and ambition cannot live in the same body. That taking up a lot of visual space is somehow incompatible with being taken seriously.
Dolly Parton has spent sixty years being a living, rhinestone-bedazzled proof of the opposite.
I want my daughters to take their joy as seriously as anything else they carry. It is not the decoration on their life. It is part of the foundation.