I was standing in front of my bathroom mirror getting ready for a college house party the night I heard a TV broadcaster announce that Whitney Houston had died. The death of a woman whose music had been a big part of the soundtrack to my childhood was difficult to reconcile with that voice that seemed too big for death to take.
One of her songs came on the radio on the drive over, and I sat in the car for about 15 minutes after arriving for the party trying to rid my face of the evidence of my sadness over the loss of a woman I had not, in all my 22 years, ever even seen in person. But when I walked inside, several of the guys (the party was all guys so far, much to their chagrin) were standing in the kitchen.
One saw the tell-tale redness on my face and began to sing: “If I should stay, I would only be in your way.” The other men joined in, standing around me and singing an impromptu, a cappella rendition of “I Will Always Love You”—the song that Whitney Houston turned into a phenomenon with “The Bodyguard.”
There was something comforting about knowing I wasn’t the only one who felt the loss of this woman whose voice had touched the lives of so many people. I felt that way again this week after the woman who first wrote and recorded that song, the incomparable Dolly Parton, passed away at the age of 80. The endless tributes pouring out from people of all backgrounds and the videos showing her humor, humility and kindness across decades make it clear that she was someone special.
Dolly Parton didn’t do partisan politics (which is why she rejected both President Trump and President Biden’s efforts to give her the Presidential Medal of Freedom), but she cared about people.
She made clear where she stood on gay rights and marriage equality (“I think everybody should be allowed to be who they are, and to love who they love”); on Tennessee’s anti-trans laws (“They cannot help (being trans) any more than I can help being Dolly Parton”); and on Black lives (“Do we think our little white asses are the only ones that matter? No!”).
After Whitney’s rendition of “I Will Always Love You” became a worldwide, Grammy-winning smash, Parton could’ve pocketed a lot of money from royalties. Instead, she used the $10 million she earned from Houston’s track to invest in a Black neighborhood in Nashville.
She stood up for and cheered on other artists, and didn’t abide meanness. When 2000s celebrity gossipmonger Perez Hilton tried to goad her into saying that pop star Jessica Simpson’s performance of Parton’s song “9 to 5” “sucked,” Dolly refused to abide him. “No, she didn’t, now. She did not,” she said. Then, she added a deadly warning coming from a southern lady: “I thought she was precious. Now, don’t you get on my bad side.”
Dolly was born in a two-room cabin in Tennessee, and her family was so poor that they had to pay the doctor who delivered her with a sack of cornmeal; she even sang about her “Coat of Many Colors” that her mother made her out of colorful rags and fabric scraps. But even after she became fabulously rich, she never forgot her poor Smoky Mountain roots and continue to give back to the place she came from.
We live in a world where the filthy rich are stacking up treasures for themselves on earth at the expense of the rest of us, buying off politicians for their own purposes, razing the planet for their greed and cutting off critical lifelines to the world’s poorest. Then there’s Dolly, who has given more than 300 million free books to children around the world with her Imagination Library, funded children’s hospitals, and she gave $1 million to fund the research for Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine that helped save countless lives during the pandemic.
Like her Christianity, Dolly’s feminism was less something she preached and more something she lived. She was a feminist who defended the right of women to be strong and independent but also glitzy, gaudy and even a little skanky if they so chose. She often joked, while addressing her own “tacky” style and buxom looks, that “it costs a lot of money to look this cheap.”
“I make jokes about it, but it’s the truth that I kind of patterned my look after the town tramp,” she once explained. “I didn’t know what she was, just this woman who was blond and piled her hair up, wore high heels and tight skirts, and, boy, she was the prettiest thing I’d ever seen. Momma used to say, ‘Aw, she’s just trash,’ and I thought, ‘That’s what I want to be when I grow up. Trash.'”
There’s something I really love about the thought of her as an innocent child, seeing this “trampy” woman that all the adults mocked, ridiculed and looked down on, and thinking of her instead as something to aspire to.
And really, I don’t see that as distinguishable from the sincere Christian faith that she practiced in her everyday life. While a lot of good Christian folk might look down on the town tramp, she’s exactly the kind of person that the Jesus whose example Dolly followed defended and uplifted in the New Testament.
In The New Yorker, Casey Cep described Parton as an “outlaw Christian, who loved Jesus and refused to hate anyone.”
“She called herself a Jezebel, yet woke up every morning at 3 A.M. to pray and, often, ask God two questions: ‘How can you use me?’ and ‘What can I do today?’ Unlike most of us who ask questions like that, it seems like she really heeded the answer,” Cep wrote.
I think that’s right. Every Christian has heard the question, “What would Jesus do?” asked as a moral imperative to guide them in their decision-making. In Christian theology, though, Jesus was perfect, a man without sin. W.W.J.D. is a lot to live up to. If you’re ever unsure of how to treat another person who crosses your path, but you aren’t feeling the spark of the divine, it’s worth asking an alternative: “What would Dolly do?”
She showed us you don’t have to be perfect. You just have to choose to be kind, and generous and compassionate. You just have to choose to see the humanity in the people you meet along life’s journey.
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