We could be wrong, but we could swear the stars in last Tuesday night’s sky looked a little like rhinestones. Which would make sense because Dolly Parton has left this earthly plane for a celestial one, bringing a whole lot of sparkle with her.
Among the flood of tributes to Parton on her passing at age 80, country singer Kacey Musgraves may have summed it up best: “The world seems a whole lot less sparkly all of a sudden.”
Dolly Parton was a lot of things but shy and retiring were not among them. If her dreams of stardom were going to come true, she needed to make an impression and, damn, could that woman make an impression.
Wrapping her hourglass figure on the most shimmering and shining of outfits, augmenting her five foot tall self with high heels and even higher hair, she was impossible to miss and impossible to forget.
And when she sang in a voice so pure, so crystal clear, she revealed the natural beauty under the glitz and the talent as monumental as the mountains of her Tennessee home.
In a business that prefers cookie-cutter sameness, Dolly cut her own path. She wrote her own songs when few country performers, particularly women, did.
And what songs. They seemed to exist outside any genre. “Jolene,” “Coat of Many Colors,” “Love Is Like a Butterfly” — there’s no formula here, just was unbridled self-expression that first touched country audiences and then the world at large.
Well before Mr. and Mrs. Swift brought little Taylor into the world, Dolly made her own gracious transition from country to pop in a way that made any grumblings about selling out sound silly and hollow.
She simply was too much to be contained by genre or medium. She added movie star (9 to 5), entrepreneur (Dollywood) and philanthropist (Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library) to her resume without ever seeming to spread herself too thin. “I still have so many things I want to accomplish,” she told an interviewer just days before her passing. That statement has been called heartbreaking, but it’s proof that Dolly fully and truly lived right up until she didn’t.
Mourn her passing but celebrate the life of a woman who dared to dream big and made her own fairy tale come true many times over.