Dolly Parton was a lot of things – a country musician, a philanthropist, an actress, a storyteller and a businesswoman. One thing she never was, however, was a politician.
But don’t think it’s because no one asked her. In 1999, during an appearance on the talk show Prime Time Country!, the singer was asked by a young woman in the audience if she would ever run for office.
Dolly demurred, with her characteristic razor-sharp wit. “I think of myself more as a diplomat. That’s the kind of people who tell you to go to hell in such a way you look forward to the trip.”
It’s something she’d had to do many times over a career that spanned decades and genres. With a fanbase that included grandmas and Gen-Zers, Republicans and Democrats, drag queens and evangelicals, Parton was a kind of unicorn in America’s polarised society.
“She is the one person who straddles political divides… the so-called culture wars,” said Sarah Phillips, who teaches an Anthropology of Dolly Parton course at Indiana University – and still finds it hard to speak about the singer in the past tense. The professor “curled into a ball” in her office and “just sobbed” upon hearing of the death.
A recent poll by YouGov said that Parton’s net approval rating was 65% – compared with Barack Obama’s 14%, Taylor Swift’s 3%, Donald Trump’s -19% and Joe Biden’s -18%.
PA MediaMuch of that universal appeal has been attributed to Parton’s steadfast refusal to weigh into politics, for fear of alienating her fans.
“I’ve got as many Republican fans as Democrats and I don’t want to make any of them mad at me, so I don’t play politics,” she once said during an interview with Fox News.
She turned down the Presidential Medal of Freedom from two different presidents. She twice declined Donald Trump’s offer, citing scheduling and health reasons. So when Joe Biden offered it to her a few years later, she felt she had to decline as well, otherwise it would look like she had a preference for one over the other.
After news broke on Tuesday of Parton’s death, tributes poured in from politicians from both sides. Trump ordered American flags to be flown at half mast – an honour usually reserved for elite statesmen and judges.
“There has never been anyone like her, and never will,” Trump wrote on social media.
In her own social media post, Hillary Clinton wrote “she was the best of America”.
Getty ImagesEven though she avoided partisan politics, Parton was never apolitical – speaking about subjects including women’s rights, LGBTQ equality and Black Lives Matter.
That commitment to speaking her mind, and her “amazing sense of self”, Phillips said, was integral to Parton’s near-universal appeal and self-styled diplomacy.
“She has always been a model for women, carving your own path, looking out for yourself, making sure that you retain the rights to your intellectual property, looking out for your own financial and creative independence,” Phillips told the BBC.
“And if that’s not feminism, I don’t know what is.”
Public interest in Parton’s views began many years ago, when she made it clear to anyone listening that she was not a cookie-cutter country singer.
In 1977, she became a crossover pop sensation, but instead of alienating her base, she grew her audience. Then, in 1980, she made her film debut in 9 to 5, a dark satire about women’s rights in the workplace helped by Jane Fonda. Fonda was persona non-grata in many parts of the country for her anti-Vietnam War activism.
But Parton refused to distance herself from Fonda just to appease her more conservative fans. She said: “I respect anybody’s beliefs and the fact that they’re willing to stand up for whatever it is. But I’m also the kind of person that if I don’t like where you got it, I can tell you where to put it.”
After learning of her death, Fonda posted on social media: “She is woven into all our lives and hearts forever.”
Parton’s image is similarly woven into public minds: always camp, always glamorous, always smiling and always kind. Her aesthetics were deliberately cultivated, another calculated move from a shrewd entrepreneur who understood showbusiness as well as she understood people.
When television journalist Barbara Walters grilled Parton about her looks in a 1977 segment – asking if the singer was a joke – the interviewer arguably met her match.
“Dolly Parton made it very clear that she knows exactly what she’s doing,” Phillips said, reflecting on how Parton handled the interview.
“This is how she feels comfortable, and she even said [to Walters]: ‘Everybody thinks that the joke’s on me, but in fact, the joke is on the public. I know very well what I’m doing, and I can change my image any time I want to.'”
Journalists have tried – and failed – over the years to get Parton to go off script. But whenever they asked her to weigh into political terrain, she would pivot like a boxer.
Instead of left-hooks, Parton’s main defences were humour and self-deprecation. During a press conference in 2016, she told a gaggle of journalists that “I’ve been thinking about running myself… we could use a few more boobs in the race”, and nodded at her chest.
But Parton never did run for office – even though her father, when he was alive, liked to drive around town with a bumper sticker that said “Dolly for President”.
Instead she poured her heart and soul into her philanthropy – like her Imagination Library, which sent free books to children around the world, or her work helping to fund the Moderna Covid-19 vaccine.
Getty ImagesHer charity came from a deeply personal place.
Parton grew up in abject poverty, raised in a one-bedroom log cabin alongside 11 siblings. When her career took off, she employed much of her family in her business endeavours and spread that wealth to the local Tennessee community.
She bought an ownership stake in an existing theme park in 1986 in the mountains where she grew up, and it was rechristened Dollywood: a resort and enterprise that remains the single largest employer in the county.
Tennessee musician James Rogers, president of the board of the American Eagle Foundation – which joined forces with Dollywood for a bald eagle sanctuary – recalled the singer’s unrivalled kindness and one-on-one attentiveness.
“She’s even sweeter than you realise,” he told the BBC, recalling a time decades ago when Parton arrived for a performance and spotted him to the side with his wife and daughter Heather, who was around 10 years old.
Parton “detoured the whole entourage to come around over there to where we were and then she knelt down to talk to Heather for a minute”.
“The truth is, she supports everybody,” said Phillips, who grew up in the North Carolina mountains “across the holler” from Parton’s Appalachian Tennessee.
The professor spends “a lot of time” in her class exploring Parton’s politics – or “Dollitics”, a phrase coined by the singer’s nephew to describe her way of handling thorny subjects.
“She wants all boats to rise.”
Phillips added that Parton was emblematic of the very values America was built upon and still holds dear, namely “independence” and “freedom to do what you want”.
“When we think about the American Dream in the sort of old-fashioned sense of – If you’re talented, if you work really, really, really hard, you can achieve your dreams – she embodied that very much.”
Phillips and and the many people who paid tribute to the late singer all noted how singular Parton was.
“This summer, I was in France, and I was in Poland, and I ask people, who’s the Polish Dolly Parton? Who’s the French Dolly Parton?” Phillips said.
“And nobody has an answer, because there isn’t one.”
