As Rich as She Could Be

I was maybe 15 years old the first time I saw Dolly Parton. She was sitting across from Michael Parkinson, lighting up the little television in glorious technicolor. She was all big hair and rhinestones and wit, unapologetic and fully aware of the sparkling production she had created – the sheer excess of it.

Almost fifty years later, she may be the reason I still wear make-up. I love more than a little sparkle, and I don’t object to a shot of Botox here and there. Why look tired if you don’t feel tired?

I heard her give an interview once when she said she always wanted to be ready, because what if there was a tornado or an earthquake, or she got in an accident? I understand this. I have spent most of my adult life trying to remain ambulance ready – at least cosmetically.

I have also always wanted to be ready with the right words at the right moment.

On that particular front, Dolly and I part company. The right words usually find me after I’ve hung up.

She sang “Coat of Many Colors” on Parkinson’s show that night, and it would come to belong to the house I grew up in on the Dublin Road almost as much as it belonged to the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee.

I can still hear my Da finding the harmonies with a confidence that grew from how much he loved her story.

He has a weakness for a tale with a moral in it, especially the biblical kind, and this one had all the ingredients – the true story of a hard childhood, a formidable mother, too many children in a house that didn’t have enough room for all of them, and somebody who could make something out of nothing.

The coat was made from scraps and the other children made fun of it, but to Dolly it was beautiful because her mother had made it with love.

They laughed at her, but she knew better.

My dad would have understood that too. One of the things he tried very hard to teach me – and it helped me through more personal and professional ordeals I can recall – was this: Don’t ever let anyone make little of you.

Dolly Parton never appeared to have much difficulty with that.

I still struggle.

She didn’t know me or my dad of course or millions of the people around the world who are talking about how much they love her today, but her songs did. She wrote 3,000 of them and once said they were her children, going out into the world and finding their way into places like the house I grew up in, into our cars and kitchens, and later into parts of my life I couldn’t have envisioned at 15.

Her songs stayed there too, attaching themselves to people and places and versions of myself I thought had vanished long ago, and then turned up again years later sounding exactly the same, when I was not.

Along with “Coat of Many Colors,” there was “Jolene” which sounded different once I was old enough to understand what she was actually asking and then there was “9 to 5” which was funny until I had been working long enough to recognize more of it than I might have liked. And although she didn’t write “Sweet Music Man” it remains one of the songs that has stayed with me. I supposed it makes more sense to me now that I have a sweet music man of my own, and whenever he sings it, I add the harmony.

Songs wait for you.

They can wait for years, and then one day you are standing behind a microphone in Mexico, singing harmony beneath a song you first loved in another country and another life. You have changed almost beyond recognition.

The song is the same.

As if 3,000 songs weren’t enough to leave behind, Dolly Parton put millions of books into the hands of children, because she understood that a child with a book has some place else to go.

Books and songs have always done something similar for me.

And Dolly Parton is still here. In the songs and the harmonies, in good-hearted stories about people who didn’t have a whole lot and knew that wasn’t the same thing as having nothing, and, I suppose, in old women like me who see no good reason to give up big hair or sparkle.

I’ve loved her for a very long time.

I expect I always will.

Dolly Parton
January 19, 1946 – August 25, 2026