“Don’t get so busy making a living that you forget to make a life.”
That’s a quote from Dolly Parton, the late world-renowned country singer, actress, philanthropist and fashion icon. Most people know Parton for her music, her larger-than-life presentation, the wigs, the rhinestones and the songs everyone’s grandmother can sing along to.
But there was a whole other side to her career that rarely gets top billing: the causes she poured herself and her money into, the people she showed up for and the lives she changed without ever writing a song about it.
Long before Parton was the queen of country music, she was just a kid in a one-room cabin in the Smoky Mountains with no electricity and one book in the house: the Bible. Her dad, Robert Lee Parton, never learned to read or write. He grew up working on a farm and did not go to school. Parton said that her dad’s illiteracy “was just kind of embarrassing to him and that she didn’t want her daddy to feel embarrassed.”
So in 1995, she started the Imagination Library, a program that mails a free children’s book to registered kids every month from birth until they turn five. What started as a small effort in her home county of Sevierville, Tenn. is now international, reaching kids across the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Australia and Ireland.
By the time of her passing, the program had sent 330 million books to children, and in 2023 the American Library Association gave her lifetime membership for her impact.
Parton’s community engagement extended to disaster management. In April 2020, at the beginning of the COVID-19 Pandemic, Parton donated $1 million to Vanderbilt University Medical Center after a friend who worked there told her about some promising vaccine research. The money went toward what became known as the Dolly Parton COVID-19 Research Fund, which funded some of the earliest, most critical stages of research connected to Moderna’s vaccine.
When wildfires ripped through Sevier County, Tenn., Parton’s hometown, in November 2016, she didn’t wait for anyone to tell her what to do. Within 48 hours, she had announced the My People Fund through her Dollywood Foundation. Every family that lost their home got $1,000 a month for six months and then Parton surprised each family with a final $5,000 check, bringing each family’s total aid to $10,000 each. Parton helped close to 900 families as a result.
Parton’s support for the LGBTQ+ community spans decades. In 2009, she told CNN she supported same sex marriage, years before the Supreme Court legalized it nationwide.
As Tennessee passed laws restricting gender affirming care and drag performances in 2023 Parton spoke out again: “That’s who they are. They cannot help that any more than I can help being Dolly Parton.” She leaned into her statement, joking for years that if she hadn’t been born a woman, she’d have made a great drag queen.
When it came to revealing concrete stances, Parton spent 50 years insisting she wasn’t political. She turned down the Presidential Medal of Freedom twice, once from President Donald Trump and once from then-President Joe Biden. She turned down the offer to build a statue of herself at the Tennessee State Capitol. “I don’t do politics … I have too many fans on both sides of the fence,” Parton said.
Her work didn’t land like a political statement, because none of the issues she cared about asked anyone to pick a side first.
Parton spent her whole life proving that love doesn’t come with conditions and kindness doesn’t need a permission slip. That’s the real sparkle behind the rhinestones. Not the outfits, not the wigs, not even the songs. It was a woman who figured out that it’s possible to change more minds by showing up for people than by trying to convince them you’re right.