Dolly Was Family

Just when the world hasn’t gone to shit enough, we’ve lost Dolly Parton.

I’m not even a huge country music fan. I’m from Queens, New York, and grew up mostly in New Jersey. I don’t have some story about Dolly’s music playing in my grandmother’s kitchen in Tennessee.

But Dolly meant something to me

.I loved watching people interview her because so often they seemed to underestimate her. They’d ask about the boobs. The wigs. The clothes. The accent. Sometimes there was an unmistakable condescension underneath it all.

And Dolly was always smarter than the question.

She never seemed embarrassed by where she came from or how she looked. She didn’t apologize for the hair or the rhinestones or the body she had deliberately turned into a caricature. She knew exactly what you were thinking before you said it.

And then she’d throw it right back at you—with precision and wit, but almost never cruelty.

That’s what I loved about her. That takes an extraordinary kind of confidence and precision. She was a master communicator.

Dolly grew up poor in rural Tennessee, one of 12 children, and became one of the most successful songwriters and entertainers in American history. She never shed the accent. Never traded in the rhinestones for tasteful beige. Never tried to make herself more acceptable to people who thought sophistication had to look or sound a certain way.

She understood something I’ve come to understand more as I’ve gotten older:

Class isn’t where you’re from. It isn’t how you speak. It isn’t what you wear or how much money you have. Class is who you are—and how you treat other people.

And Dolly had class coming out of every rhinestone.

I’m surprised by how sad I am tonight. Almost as if someone in my family died.

But maybe that’s why Dolly’s death feels different.

Maybe Dolly was family.

Not because we all listened to country music. Not because we came from where she came from. But because somehow this woman from the Tennessee mountains managed to belong to all of us. She was funny and ridiculous and brilliant and generous and utterly herself.

She made being human look like something worth being proud of.

And God, I’m going to miss her.