When I was five I saw an angel. Her name was Dolly Parton.
My first concert was Dolly Parton when I was in kindergarten. I was so little I couldn’t quite read the ticket yet, and my dad had an amusing time trying to get me to sound it out. Once I did, I was very disappointed when he informed me that there were in fact, no actual dolls at the concert to join my Raggedy Ann at home. My father took me, and I admit that I fell asleep through some of the opening acts. After my nap, I remember waking up and seeing the most glamorous lady singing at a piano. She was all adorned in white; white dress, white feather boa, white baby grand piano. With my limited world view at the time, and recently having “graduated” from a church preschool, I thought she might be an angel. After all, it was December, and my parents had taken me to see productions of the Nutcracker before. I reasoned that maybe this was an angel-centric Christmas story I was unfamiliar with.
I remember hearing this angel sing about blue grass and green skies, about Jolene, about her Tennessee Mountain Home, and about her Coat of Many Colors. After that concert, I was hooked. I remember bouncing on the sofa at home after school while eating sour skittles and watching a documentary television special about Dollywood. It was recorded, and I begged my mother to replay it for me multiple times. I was determined to make it to Dollywood someday. In the following years, as I got older and had more unsupervised access to the internet, I remember feeling terribly naughty when I would deviate from playing educational math practice games or viewing sewing tutorials, and would look up more information about Dollywood.
What especially appealed to me about the park was the section serving as a sort of living history museum, with demonstrations of Appalachian folk traditions. I admired that despite her enormous success, Dolly still kept her roots close at heart. I followed this line of research, and realized that I hadn’t even known half of how true that statement was: over the years, she had multiple philanthropic outreach programs in her native Sevier County, Tennessee, in addition to her global philanthropic efforts.
At home, her efforts focused on education and literacy. She offered incentives for students to finish school and funded scholarships for further education. Dolly grew up impoverished, and knew how vital reading is. Her own father’s illiteracy inspired her to start Imagination Library; “He was the smartest man I have ever known, but I know in my heart his inability to read probably kept him from fulfilling all of his dreams,” Dolly said. Imagination a program providing a free monthly book to children from birth to age five. She began the program in her home county, but over the course of its several-decades long mission, it expanded first nationally, and then internationally: “Inspiring kids to love to read became my mission.”
Unlike her father, Dolly did learn to read growing up, but she still faced a difficult childhood. Dolly grew up in a tiny log cabin in the town of Locust Ridge. She was the fourth child out of twelve in a deeply impoverished family. In her song Coat of Many Colors, she recalls how her mother lovingly patched together a coat for her out of secondhand rags, “Mama sewed the rags together, sewin’ every piece with love, she made my coat of many colors, that I was so proud of.”
I remember hearing this song as a child and loving how she wove this beautiful story of love stitched into a coat, how she didn’t quite fit in with the other kids, but it was okay because she was unapologetically her colorful self, marching to the beat of her own drum, and the people in her life who really mattered to her could see her sparkly rainbow.
The love that she felt in this piece of clothing her mother made for her, and how she wore it without letting anyone else’s opinion sway her love for it, was one of the things that inspired me to make my own clothes, and to wear them to school. It also inspired me to make things for others, in the hopes they would be able to feel the love in each stitch, just like Dolly did.
So, as one of my (not-so-fairy) godmother duties, I charged myself with sewing my sister/goddaughter some skirts made just for her. In Dolly’s case, the other children were unkind, and said cruel things, but it’s a small part of the story. She noted their lack of understanding, and she forgave, but didn’t forget. Instead of lingering on the hurt, she poured her love and resources into that area throughout the years. Instead of letting them live rent-free in her mind and as the focal point of the song, the song instead focuses on her mother’s love, and her love of her mother. She also touches on the Bible in this, as well as many other songs. Perhaps Casey Cep summed up Dolly best in his August 26 article for the New Yorker: “Dolly Parton belonged to a beloved category: the outlaw Christian, who loved Jesus and refused to hate anyone else.”
I was ecstatic when Dolly made an appearance on my then-favourite Disney Channel show, Hannah Montana. She guest-starred as the godmother of the titular character (played by Miley Cyrus, her real-life goddaughter). This combined three things I had a fondness of: Dolly Parton, Hannah Montana, and godmothers. I’ve always been close with my own godmother, and the fact that Hannah Montana’s godmother was a person who I still wasn’t fully convinced was not actually an angel only gave more credence to my belief that there was some truth to Cinderella’s fairy godmother (princesses and fairytales were also a very hot topic for elementary school-Elizabeth). Clearly all godmothers must have a little bit of magic in them. So, logically, I aspired to be a godmother someday too, preferably of the magical variety. My parents helpfully informed me that I was already the godmother of my then-baby sister. Unfortunately, infants are not liable to be as excited about either type of music; country or western, theme park documentaries, or Disney sitcoms as their older sisters are.
Fortunately, my parents were happy to oblige my Dolly obsession and I got a teeny tiny pair of pink cowgirl boots (a fashion choice I’ve continued well-into adulthood, swapping baby pink for magenta) for my birthday that year, along with a child-sized denim pearl-snap blouse, and several different brightly-coloured bandanas (which eventually led to a terrifying encounter with a goat on the school field trip to the farm). Best of all, my father gave me a CD player and a copy of Dolly’s Live and Well album, which I played on repeat for hours in my bedroom.
My parents would play Dolly’s For God and Country album during backyard barbecues in the summer, and I would make up dances to go along with it, dancing my heart out until I collapsed onto the grass, panting but grinning. Drives with my father became a time to bond over our love of Dolly, and I remember sitting in the backseat of his truck one morning after a family breakfast at the local diner, and one line from a live recording of a Dolly show made a big impression on me. She was doing an intro for her next song, she reflected on how sometimes, you just need a good cry. So she invited the audience to join her in a big bluesy wail, and said something along the lines of, “see, didn’t that feel good now?” before launching into the song.
Pain doesn’t feel good, but it sure feels a lot better once you send it out of your body. In Dolly’s case, the pain, the love, was often transmuted into her songs. She once said, “I’ll never harden my heart, but I’ve toughened the muscles around it.” She laughed out loud, she cried that big beautiful bluesy wail of hers out loud, she loved out loud, as clear as day in her lyrics. “The way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain.” She understood balance, that the bad is part of life, and makes the good that much sweeter.
Dolly poured her whole heart and soul into her music, singing about deeply personal truths and experiences. Perhaps that is part of why she has been such a widely-beloved success for so long. Because her sparkly exterior was not just a costume for performance, but a genuine reflection of the sparkly soul underneath. She was forged under immense pressure, but remained true to where she came from and what she was made of, maintaining her strength while still showing her multi-faceted colors and edges, “It’s hard to be a diamond in a rhinestone world.”
