Sometimes, you just need a mother’s comfort, and Dolly Parton wrote and sang with that enveloping warmth.
Why is everyone so torn up about the death of yet another pop singer? Don’t these come and go every four months or so? “Why should the world fall to pieces at the death of yet another cosmetically enhanced, rhinestoned old warbler?,” a sodden middle-aged cynic like me might be expected to ask.
But I get it. I understand. So let me explain to you what Dolly Parton meant to me, and why I’ve had tears rimming my eyes occasionally over the past 24 hours, as a man who knows almost nothing of Parton’s music outside the biggest and most unavoidable of her hits. Her spirit will linger on, not just for the next week or so but long afterward. So many have written already about the grand and generous upward arc of her life story, from rural poverty to universally beloved fame. Instead, I can only write about Parton from the sole perspective on which I count myself a true authority — my own.
FLASHBACK, 1998: Kids, we used to have some hard musical dividing lines back in those ancient days of the ’90s. Back then, I knew Dolly Parton’s music as “country” (read: foreign) plus the ubiquitous “9 to 5,” and that’s about it. What I knew about instead was the phenomenon of Dolly Parton. How could anyone not? After all, no innocent eleven-year-old boy finds this album cover while idly thumbing through the family vinyl collection without being forever altered, with very strange inchoate thoughts suddenly forming in one’s preteen mind.
But hey — I soon had Beatles outtakes to listen to. And it wasn’t as if country music was the hippest of genres in the Washington, D.C., suburbs, no matter how immense its breakout crossover success in America at large at the time. (The cool cats in college weren’t exactly talking up Garth Brooks, no matter how many darn records he sold.) So, growing up as an alienated prog/art/pop-rock “hermit,” I knew of Parton only by cultural osmosis. She sang “Everyday People” with Kermit; she told off Dabney Coleman in 9 to 5. She had a remarkably pneumatic chest.
Even then, I knew her already to have been a rare talent; perhaps an angel as well. Why? Oh, I could be cheap and say I only feel this way because the first time I walked into a Phi Mu sorority party as a college freshman, I was greeted by a wall of drunken field hockey girls singing “Jolene” at the top of their lungs. (They all seemed to imagine themselves as Jolene.) It’s not that — though, brother, it helped.
In all honesty, it was because around then I first became acquainted — via a college friend from Tennessee — with Parton’s quiet yet immense legacy of good works. I guess it’s no secret anymore in this age of the internet, but once upon a time Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library — a book-gifting program — was just a quiet act of philanthropy known only by diligent Southern journalists and the children of East Tennessee and Western North Carolina. I knew a person whose younger brother grew up with that library and never forgot the personal testimony — even when public plaudits eventually came rushing in, as technology connected the world.
But maybe it runs a little deeper than that. And maybe, by explaining an intensely private moment, I can add something to our larger public sense of love and loss at Parton’s passing. Forgive me if this gets weird.
Back when my mother passed away, in 2021, I went home to Maryland for the first time in many years. During that time — and back when I still had a functioning CD-ROM on my laptop — I had occasion to revisit all of my dad’s old home videos, dutifully transferred from a 1984 JVC camcorder to VHS to digital bits.
I hope those digital bits are still there, even though my CD-ROM is gone, because now I want to revisit a moment from my childhood by which I used to feel embarrassed. You see, I was a bit of a . . . crybaby when I was a child. My brother used to haze me endlessly about it when we were younger. (Thanks, bro! You toughened me up!) But when I was reviewing those old videos, I found a clip – it must have been among the earliest, and one that my father had clearly decided was worth saving for posterity – in which I was having a hysterical panic attack, as a four-year-old, after being told that a hurricane was heading for our beach rental in Delaware. My older brother and dad clearly knew it was no big deal, so they were taking the moment to get Spaz Jeff on camera. And there I was, four years old, convinced the apocalypse was nigh.
God, it was cringey. It hurts to remember how immature you were when you couldn’t even understand death. I mention it now for one reason only: I can never forget what comes at the end, which I remember as it happened: My mother, the only one in the room who’s not making fun of me, takes me into her arms and sings a song I knew from that day onward but never fully recognized until decades later:
If I should stay
Well I would only be in your way
And so I’ll go, and yet I know
I’ll think of you each step of the way
And I will always love you
I will always love you
That was long before Whitney Houston. And yes, I know what the original song was written about, but that’s not why mom sang it to me at the time. She recognized something that forever glows within Parton’s music, that animated her spirit: Sometimes, you just need a mother’s comfort, and Dolly wrote and sang with that enveloping warmth.
So I guess that’s what Dolly Parton meant to me — and maybe to my mom as well, who fought her own way up the ladder. I can offer no better tribute to Parton than to say that she wrote the songs your mother sang to you when you were sad or scared. Parton never had kids herself — acute endometriosis made that an impossibility — but, in her music, her charity, and her eternal spirit, she became a mother to the world.