I was at work when my fiancée Lauren texted me that Dolly Parton had passed away.
Within minutes, I began to hear my coworkers in the hallway muttering to each other about the news, and I could hear the surprise and sorrow in their voices. It didn’t feel like the response to a celebrity death; it felt like the aftershocks immediately following a national tragedy.
Gallons of ink have already been spilled remembering Dolly Parton. She had a career without parallel. The Queen of Country Music, she had multiple multiplatinum albums, 11 Grammy Awards, was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame, received the National Medal of Arts, turned down the Presidential Medal of Freedom three times, and was even named a Kentucky Colonel.
Not only does that barely scratch the surface of her music career, I didn’t even mention her acting career.
What’s remarkable about Dolly Parton’s success is that she produced a staggeringly large and critically acclaimed body of work, and yet many of her fans have never even watched one of her movies or listened to a note of one of her songs. Her artistic career is one of the most impressive of all time and she somehow managed to outshine it through the strength of her humanitarian work.
She created Dollywood to bring jobs to her hometown of Sevierville, Tennessee. She funded countless scholarships. She founded Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library to put free books in the hands of children, and the program has served more than 120 million children since its founding in 1995.
Whenever a famous person dies, there are always folks who dig through their lives to find their mistakes, the things they did wrong or the things they could have done better. I have yet to see anyone speak ill of Dolly Parton in the wake of her death. She lived a life that left nary a toehold for criticism.
In the wake of her passing, there are some who have said that one thing they loved about Dolly Parton was that she “wasn’t political.” That’s not exactly true. She didn’t speak openly about politics, but she supported the LGBTQ community and transgender rights and donated money to help fund the development of the COVID-19 vaccine. I don’t think those should be political issues, but the people who claim Parton was apolitical would probably feel differently.
Dolly Parton felt like an immortal presence, less a human being than a symbol of kindness and decency, and her absence is keenly felt. But she has left us with a valuable lesson.
According to multiple sources, at the time of her death, Dolly Parton had a net worth of roughly $450 million. Had it not been for her incredible philanthropy, it’s estimated she would have had a net worth of around $9 billion.
I don’t know about you, but I can’t imagine ever thinking, “Man, I’d love to make that purchase, but unfortunately I only have half a billion dollars instead of nine billion dollars.” Dolly Parton left this world with more money than she could ever spend even after giving most of it away.
As a result, she never popped up on the Forbes Top 100 list of billionaires. She never had as much money as Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg. She never got the chance to be, even for a brief period of time, the richest human being on the planet.
Instead, she got a consolation prize: universal respect and adoration, elevation to the status of informal sainthood, and the ability to leave our world secure in the knowledge that she had improved it, in ways both large and small, for tens of millions of people for generations to come.
That seems way more satisfying than being sandwiched between two tech bros on some dumb list.
It’s been said that there are no ethical billionaires, and Dolly Parton was proof of that. She was a deeply ethical and compassionate person, and because of that, she was never a billionaire. When you have more money than you could spend in a dozen lifetimes, how can an ethical person sleep knowing that families around the nation are living out of cars and their children are starving?
Maybe Dolly had more compassion than most because she came from extreme poverty herself. Maybe it was just the way she was wired, an extremely shrewd businesswoman with a bottomless heart for the vulnerable.
Whatever the case, she served as living proof that billions of dollars can’t buy the love and respect that she cultivated among her countless fans. The legacy she leaves is one of kindness and compassion and it will last far into the future.
Barring a Christmas Eve visit from three ghosts, it’s safe to say that the same will never be said of her wealthy contemporaries.
