Dolly Parton’s Legacy Will Live On Bookshelves

I interviewed Dolly Parton once.

That doesn’t make me special — she was as media-friendly and media-savvy as anyone and conducted what had to be tens of thousands of interviews over her long and storied career as an entertainer, businesswoman and philanthropist — but it made me feel special that day.

I was nervous. I’m a Tennessee boy and Dolly, as universally beloved as she was worldwide, means just a little more to those of us from the Volunteer State. I was in good company, though, because Tim Gunn and Mike Huckabee, both of whom were taping (separate) sit-down interviews with her that day, were nervous, too.

I was, at the time, working for the Nashville Post, a business-heavy niche publication and the raison d’etre for the story was that Dolly was releasing an album through Cracker Barrel and this was the big media rollout — in addition to Gunn and Huckabee, she did sitdowns with four other TV outlets, plus satellite hits with local news and radio stations in a nine-hour evolution carefully timed by her long-time manager Danny Nozell (in a testament to both Dolly’s professionalism and Nozell’s management, the event actually stayed on schedule, even with Dolly changing outfits for every interview).

There’s a lot of takeaways about just who Dolly was that could be gleaned from just that day. A shrewd businesswoman. A relentlessly hard worker. A gracious soul (this was just a few months after the death of Whitney Houston and every interviewer asked about it and Dolly gave original answers each time she was asked, but all were flecked with appreciation and love for Houston). Even the fact that both Tim Gunn — a gay man who is an icon in high fashion — and Mike Huckabee — an arch social conservative — both dropped everything to fly to Nashville, both paced nervously before the interviews and both gushed at her legend is a lesson about Dolly.

But looking back, I realized that I was perhaps extra nervous for that interview in mid-April of 2012, because my daughter would be born April 20.

And just a few weeks later, she got mail from Dolly. The first of 60 pieces of mail she’d get from her over the first five years of her life.

My daughter received a book every month from “Aunt Dolly” until her fifth birthday. Age-appropriate, growing as she did (my God, the number of times I read “Llama Llama Red Pajama”), establishing a foundation for reading that continues (these days she’s reading a memoir by Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein and a history of women in punk; she also predicts Chappell Roan will sing “9 to 5” at the Daisy Chain Fields festival this weekend in Irvine, though I suspect there’ll be plenty of Dolly tributes on offer there).

My daughter is not special in that regard, of course, as by now Imagination Library has mailed more than 300 million of those books to children not just in Tennessee, not just in the U.S., but worldwide. An effort she started with her beloved father, who never learned to read or write and saw his daughter become one of the world’s most incandescent stars, the Imagination Library is, Dolly said herself, her most cherished legacy.,

When I got my few minutes with Dolly that day, she talked some about how she kept finding new audiences. Houston’s cover of “I Will Always Love You” reintroduced her to a new generation. Her turn as “Aunt Dolly” to her actual goddaughter Miley Cyrus’ Hannah Montana to another. She even mentioned The White Stripes’ cover of “Jolene.” These days, no doubt Beyoncé’s version of the song and Dolly’s duet with Sabrina Carpenter on the latter’s remix of her hit “Please Please Please” opened up ears to Dolly to yet another generation.

As critical as those moments were, Dolly’s legacy for generations to come will come in the mail, right on time, once a month.

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