I started the More newsletter earlier this year because I wanted one place on Substack that had no fixed shape. No ten-story format, no daily briefing rules, no series to keep moving forward. Lately, More has mostly become the Morning Compass and the Morning Comments videos, and that is fine, but the original idea was simpler.
Remember when I wrote, “More is where the stories go that do not fit anywhere else”? Tonight is one of those nights; I’ll be back with a Morning Compass tomorrow.
Dolly Parton died today at 80. Every outlet in the world will tell you about the songwriting, the voice, the twenty-five country number ones, the rhinestones. I will not try to compete with that. But those of you who regularly read my Notes will know that I have a series of video clips on kindness: a variety of events or stories of people being kind to each other in a time when increasingly many people are not. I know some of you have noticed that habit even though I rarely explain it here. Dolly Parton’s whole life fits that theme better than almost anyone I can think of, so tonight (it’s night in Europe) felt like the right night to write about her, not as a music critic, but through that lens.
Although I didn’t grow up putting her albums on, she’s been part of the background of my life since my high school days in a village in the Netherlands. Always on the radio somewhere, always recognizable within two notes, and always reminding me I wanted to visit the country that produced so much of the music on European radio. What struck me over the years was not the music so much as the character behind it. She kept being pointed to as someone genuinely decent, and the more I read about her, the more that held up.
Dolly Parton never seemed to need anyone’s approval to feel secure in who she was. She could also laugh at herself before anyone else got the chance. Both elements come back in this quote:
That same steadiness may explain something rarer. In an America split down the middle on almost everything, Dolly Parton was liked by both sides. Republicans in Sevier County claimed her as their own. Progressive audiences admired her support for LGBTQ rights and her refusal to sign on to a North Carolina bathroom bill. I cannot think of many public figures left in America who cross that line so easily. I watch American politics from Europe and believe the space for shared affection has become quite narrow; she’s one of the few who still occupies it.
She grew up poor in Sevier County, Tennessee, in a family where her father never learned to read. Later, through the Dollywood Foundation, she ran a program pairing middle school students with a “buddy,” paying each one five hundred dollars for finishing high school. In the classes that took part, the dropout rate fell from 35 percent to 6 percent. That is kindness at scale.
The clearest expression of that same instinct came in 1995, when she launched the Imagination Library. Every enrolled child receives one free book a month, mailed with their own name on it, from birth until age five. The program has now sent more than 300 million books across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Ireland. She once said the point wasn’t just the reading. It was that a child opens the mailbox and finds something addressed to them, personally, and feels noticed. It fits all my criteria for a kindness video on Notes.
When wildfires tore through the Smoky Mountains in 2016, her My People Fund started paying displaced families within 48 hours, eventually giving more than 900 households ten thousand dollars each, renters included. And in 2020, she gave a million dollars to Vanderbilt University Medical Center for early coronavirus research, work that later fed into the Moderna vaccine trials, one contribution among many in a much larger effort. But it was real kindness at the right place at the right time.
None of this required her to leave the stage or soften the glamour. She kept the wigs, the nails, the joke about how much money it takes to look this cheap. She just never let any of it become the point.
Thank you, Dolly Parton, for all you did. RIP
Alexander
A recording from 1983.
NOTES AND SOURCES
Obituary and family statement: NPR, “Dolly Parton, country music icon, dies at 80” - https://www.npr.org/2026/08/25/nx-s1-3650175/dolly-parton-obituary
Career and biography: The Guardian, “Dolly Parton, country star, actor and philanthropist, dies aged 80” - https://www.theguardian.com/music/2026/aug/25/dolly-parton-country-singer-dead
Buddy Program and dropout rate: Dollywood Foundation, “History” - https://dollywoodfoundation.org/history/
Imagination Library scale: Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, “International Research” - https://imaginationlibrary.com/international-research/
Smoky Mountain wildfire relief: My People Fund - https://dollyparton.com/tag/my-people-fund
Covid-19 research donation: BBC News, “Dolly Parton ‘honoured and proud’ to help Covid-19 battle” - https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-54974987
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