In 2010, my now husband and I were road tripping through the American South, and we made the requisite pilgrimage to Dollywood in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee on our Appalachian adventure.
Dollywood is one of the few remaining places in the US where people of all races, class and creed come together. As we drove through the Appalachian Mountains, we listened to the iconic “Dolly Parton’s America” (link below). We had always appreciated Dolly’s music but were delighted to understand her as a social force, philanthropist, businesswoman and theologian.
It strikes me that on the news of her passing, we at Uniting can take time to reflect on what she can teach us:
- Grief, Joy, Humour and Imagination
- Relationality
- Changing the World
- Dolly’s Passing
1. Grief, Joy, Humour & Imagination
Death, sadness, hard times and heartbreak happen. Unlike so many contemporary distractors, she never glossed it over. She embraced it. She sung about it. She spoke about it, and she helped people process that grief. She moved us toward being human, not distracting us from being human. Joy is different to happiness because it is ongoing, and cannot truly thrive without us having experienced pain.
Dolly didn’t deny gender, sexuality or sensuality. With humour she created space for people to breathe. It is hard for us young people to remember how taboo simple human sexuality was in previous decades. She understood the constraints of gender norms, highlighted them, amplified them, and challenged them.
Humour, like joy, operates in a tension between our expectations and surprise. Like joy, it often reveals a deeper, unsaid human truth. The quality of grief, joy and humour is something we can learn from. Dolly was deeply grounded in the realities of human life – she understood the world as it is.
Through her music, and when she would speak about universal love, or loving your neighbour, or loving people who are different, or loving yourself, Dolly was conjuring the ideal — the world as it should be.
If we imagine play dough, Lego, or kids’ craft, we know that imagination needs fuel. Grief, poverty, heartbreak, gender discrimination, death — this is the fuel that inspires so much of Dolly’s music. You start with a mess and build something out of it. We create the world as it could be. You can’t build anything if you stay only in the world as it is. And you can’t build anything if you stay only in the world of ideas.
Imagination for us means being rooted in the messiness, mortality, systems, business, political, market and regulatory realities of today — but striving for a daily lived experience of the radical, and at our best miraculous, love, care, compassion and respect that is withheld from so many people.
What is underappreciated about Dolly Parton is that she was an unapologetic businesswoman. She made millions and millions of dollars, and she never denied that. She acted and lived as if her goal was to spread more of herself, spread more of her joy, to as many people as possible. She had a keen sense of judgment and wisdom, and woe to anyone who would underestimate Dolly Parton. She was human about money; she was up front about it. She didn’t gloss over it or think money immoral.
Dolly built a brand, licensing, a theme park, foundations and institutions — ways to carry her values on in a form that will outlive her. Her influence became global, because she understood that generosity and stewardship are not counterposed. Like Dolly, we have an identity centred around love, while operating a massive enterprise that depends on getting the business right. Better to be explicit about it, with good humour, reality and charm. If we don’t pay attention to being good stewards, we can’t spread our values. We want people everywhere to experience the kind of inclusion and love that our people and communities create.
Dolly also embraced technology. She went from radio, to TV, to musicals, to podcasts. She used music technology, built new rides at Pigeon Forge, and adapted to social media. She recorded her voice in parts to build songs for the future, long after she is gone. At Dollywood, we saw that she had turned herself into a hologram! At every point, she saw new technology as a delightful opportunity to understand the world through a different lens and set of tools. The identity and the love stayed the same — she simply embraced new tools to spread it. Likewise for us.
2. Relationality
Dolly knew she was human. She knew she was broken and flawed. She was vulnerable in interviews about her upbringing, her personal relationships, her business relationships – she never denied the hard times. She treated these as life lessons. I often felt myself thinking, “well, if Dolly can experience that and speak about it with such generosity and perspective, maybe so can I.” That’s the strength and courage to put your heart on your sleeve and just tell it how it is, as a human being, one person to another.
Dolly shared that this comes from growing up in a tiny Appalachian town, where relationships are how you live, survive and thrive. Family comes first, because that’s who you can depend on. This is expressed in her songcraft, and it feeds a yearning for so many of us isolated in a tick-a-box, automated world. Whether across Australia, in Aotearoa or in North America, it is almost taken as given amongst my First Nations colleagues that Dolly is beloved. Driving in Western Montana, listening to the closing bars of Jolene, an Aunty and colleague once shared with me:
“Dolly embodies relationality, that is so G*damn missing from the industrialised and colonialised foster care industry.”
For us at Uniting, relationality is central to our models and methods of care — in our partnerships, our First Nations governance principles, and everything from tendering to transformation. Perhaps Dolly gives us clues in how to embody that relationality in our day-to-day work. That same relationality, when it’s alive in a whole community rather than just a family, is how ordinary people end up changing the world.
3. Changing the World
There’s an old saying in church circles: “Always preach the gospel, and if necessary, use words.” For us Christians, Dolly exemplified one of the best examples of how to live in a secular, pluralist world. At no point did she use the Bible to beat anyone down. But at no point did you doubt that her faith was a deep and abiding motivator. She would sing about it. She would talk about it. And she would live it out.
Dolly Parton is one of those rare people who is a political unifier. One of the things that was clear on our US trip in 2010 was that whether you’re a Democrat, a Republican, or disinterested in politics altogether, everyone loves Dolly Parton — and that is even rarer now. It isn’t simply that her music delighted us throughout our lives, but that we got to “know” Dolly. It was her personal capacity to inspire people — to love, to charm, to delight. Dolly could overcome the rage and reactive politics of our contemporary time because she spoke to a unity of human experience, rather than the identity tribalism that says we are the “us” and you are the “them.” As our friends at Wayside share, Dolly lived out “a world without us and them.”
Sometimes controversially, she avoided the temptation throughout her life to be drawn into the deeply political issues of the day. Some may have criticised her for that, but even a warty old leftie like me can see that she was doing something bigger. For those of us interested in change toward the common good, we know it is almost impossible to imagine a better world with a scarcity mindset.
Change requires a sense that we’re in this together — a common identity that says together we can do it. Without that joy, fear, isolation and suspicion lead us as humans to a place of not wanting change. To bunker down. Bunkering down means pointing a finger at the “them.” Protecting ourselves first. Rejecting the world, rejecting others. Rejecting immigrants, or whichever minority is today’s scapegoat. Sometimes, in a conversation, when confronted with that kind of thinking, I’ll challenge my friend: “I wonder what Dolly Parton would think of that.” Dolly’s ability to create that sense of universal love is probably far more important than her stepping in as an advocate on any individual issue.
For us at Uniting, we are interested in political issues, and we will take positions — we have a specific and active role to play here in NSW and the ACT. But our advocacy will never demonise or isolate those who disagree with us. Infuriatingly for them, we will keep loving them till they see our vision.
As we do so, we are called in this organisation to create an environment — in our services, in our media, in our advocacy — that uplifts the “us” of a loving and open Australia: an expression of Christian love. It’s in that same spirit of unity and love that we now sit with the news of Dolly’s passing.
4. Dolly’s Passing
Like when the Queen died, the grief felt about Dolly’s passing may be heightened by the experience of sorrow and awe at time’s passage. Her songs gave us a soundtrack to our lives, at different stages and times. For some of our residents, who grew up with Dolly, her soundtracks of early love, loves lost, love reclaimed, hard times and romance may have lined up with their own. 9 to 5 may have been the newly released anthem and movie that coincided with their own confrontations with workplace patriarchy and the glass ceiling. A constant in our lives is no longer with us.
And because of the nature of our work, some of our residents will be off to see Dolly in her new home very soon. As I reflect on what she has meant for me, there is perhaps a little pang of jealousy. I hope that on my deathbed — whether it be soon or a long time from now (and I hope it’s the latter, but you never know) — I’ll be ready to meet my maker, and all those I’ve loved and lost through my life.
Already, Dolly Parton’s songs, humour and theology have prepared me to face my mortality with an open and prepared heart. And when I am reunited with that cloud of saints and sinners, you can guarantee I’ll be in line at the heavenly meet-and-greet to see Saint Dolly at work.
David Barrow is the Director of Mission and Social Impact at Uniting
