Dolly.

I met up with Dolly Parton three times over the course of the last 53 years. None of those would have been occasions that she’d have remembered,, but they mattered a whole lot to me.

The first time I met Dolly was just a few months after I’d suffered a heartbreak that seemed, at the time, like one I’d never recover from. It was the summer of 1973. She was performing at a fairground near Hanover, New Hampshire. I was 19 years old, which means Dolly would have been 28. I’d published my first book that spring. I sent a message to her before the show. “I’d love to meet you.“

There was no writing assignment attached to this, no magazine paying me to write a story. Outside the rarefied world of country music, Dolly Parton wasn’t the household name she later became, or anything close, but she said yes to meeting up. We sat on the porch of the Hanover Inn—she in full regalia, in a stiff blonde wig and a laugh as clear and easy -flowing as a mountain stream. We talked for an hour.

At the time, I listened to a lot of Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan—loved the Rolling Stones, Joan Baez, Leonard Cohen, Doc Watson, Creedence Clearwater, the Supremes. But the albums I played more than anything else were Dolly’s. More often than not hers was the voice that stayed in my head. Better than anybody, she seemed to understand heartbreak, but more importantly, resilience.

Dolly and I met again in 1975, when I made a trip to Nashville. Once again, I had no writing assignment, just my own personal goal—that came from years of listening to country music-- of trying to meet and speak with artists whose work I loved. Within a couple of days of my arrival in Nashville I was in the office of Mae Boren Axton, an iconic figure in the music industry at the time, a music producer and the woman who’d written “Heartbreak Hotel” .

Mae Axton made a few calls on my behalf, and within an hour I was sitting on a couch in Tammy Wynette’s house. Then I was paying a visit to Porter Wagoner. By nightfall I was sitting at the bar at a little club called Possum Holler, listening to George Jones.

But the highlight of my trip came when I met Dolly again, and she invited me to join her on her tour bus with her band—also her lifelong friend, Judy, and one of her many sisters, to a show that night somewhere in Tennessee.

By this point I’d interviewed a few famous people in my life as a journalist. “Did you ever meet Elvis?” she asked me. I could tell it would have meant a lot to her if the answer had been yes, but I had to leave it that I’d corresponded, very briefly, with John Lennon. That piece of news didn’t carry much weight with Dolly. The Beatles weren’t part of her pantheon. Still, we laughed a lot on the bus, and that night she dedicated her performance of “Jolene” to me.

In the years that followed, I discovered that a heartbreak at age 19 would not be the defining event of my life. I married…had children…lost my parents….divorced….carried on. There wasn’t a week of my life, and seldom a day, when Dolly Parton’s songs didn’t make their way into my CD player.

“Wildflowers.” “My Tennessee Mountain Home”. Every single song on the Trio album. “I Will Always Love You.” And so many, many more.

Back in those days, I supported my family mostly by writing for women’s magazines. I got one of them—Ladies’ Home Journal, I think , or maybe McCall’s—to give me the assignment of interviewing Dolly, so I flew to some city where she was performing. We talked for an hour or so—Dolly, funny and engaging as ever—the unreality of her hair and breasts, her impossibly tiny waist, serving as her own not-so-private joke. Truth to tell, there wasn’t a famous person around more real than Dolly Parton.

Just before we said goodbye, I asked Dolly a favor. My three children were still young then, and living at home with me. I had a tape recorder in my bag. “Would you say hello to my kids?” I asked her. “And tell them….oh, tell them to always do what their mother says?”

There came that laugh again. She pushed the button on the tape recorder and leaned in to my cassette machine.

“Hi Kids,” she said. “This is Dolly talking. I won’t tell you to do every little thing your mama tells you because that wouldn’t be much fun. I’ll just tell you to be kind and have a real good time doing it.”

I attended one of her rare concerts , a few years back, but that was the last time I got to talk with Dolly Parton. Still, her music –most of all those old songs of hers she wrote way back in the 70’s--remained so important to me that I have put one in just about each of the many books I’ve published over the years since. From Baby Love to How the Light Gets In, there’s usually some moment in the story when some character put on a Dolly Parton song. As I will now.

There are musicians whose music and performances move me greatly, singers I respect and admire, singers who make me want to get up and dance,. And then there was Dolly. It’s impossible to speak of her in the past tense. There are singers whose music you care about greatly, and singers you simply love. She is one.

Dolly Parton. January 19, 11946 - August 25, 2026