08/29/2026
What does Dolly Parton have to do with our book club, you might ask?
This paragraph caught my attention:
“Her father lived long enough to see local kids call his daughter "the Book Lady." Before he passed, he told her the Imagination Library was the most important thing she had ever done. A man who could never read a single page made sure his daughter heard that.”
We have read three wonderful books about the Appalachian pack horse library program and the “book ladies” who delivered free book and magazine loans to children, parents and grandparents across the region. In many cases, that was their only access to the modern printed word. Dolly Parton truly was a contemporary book lady!
RIP, ma’am. You will be greatly missed, but Imagination Library will continue your literacy mission.
America lost Dolly Parton this week at the age of 80, and the tributes have rightly poured in for the music.
The songs earned every word of praise. Still, the story worth telling our children and grandchildren is what she did with her fortune once she had one.
In 1988 she went home to Sevier County, Tennessee, where the high school dropout rate stood at 35 percent.
She gathered every 7th and 8th grader in the county into one room and told each of them to pick a buddy.
Then she put a contract in front of them. If both buddies graduated, she would hand each one a check for $500. If either quit school, neither got paid.
The design worked because no teenager wants to be the reason a friend loses money. Kids who might have drifted away suddenly had someone watching out for them every single day.
She handed out those checks herself at graduation. The dropout rate fell from 35 percent to 6 percent.
A year later, she offered $500 to every kid in the county who enrolled at the local college.
She understood what that money meant, because she was the first person in her family to finish high school.
Most people remember what she did after the Gatlinburg wildfires in 2016.
Her fund sent 900 families $1,000 a month for six months while they rebuilt their lives.
Fewer people know the rest of that story. The fund raised more than anyone expected, so she showed up in person that May and handed each of those families an extra $5,000.
Then she placed $3 million with the local recovery group that stays on the ground for years after the news trucks pack up and leave.
She built her home county a hospital. She played a benefit concert in 2007, her Dollywood and Stampede businesses matched the proceeds, and LeConte Medical Center opened its doors in 2010.
Inside it, a birthing unit and a women’s health center serve the same mountain families she grew up among.
Speaking of Dollywood, she opened that park in 1986 for one stated reason. She wanted her people to have good jobs without leaving the mountains, and today it stands among the largest employers in the region.
In 2022 she went further and began covering 100 percent of tuition, books, and fees for any Dollywood employee who wanted more education.
The benefit reached full-time workers, part-time workers, and seasonal workers alike, starting on their first day.
Back in 1991, she paid for a sanctuary at the park for bald eagles too injured to survive in the wild. She issued no press release about it. Our national bird needed a home, and she provided one.
When Hurricane Helene tore through Western North Carolina in 2024, she wrote a personal check for $1 million, and her companies matched it.
Tennessee was her home, and she owed North Carolina nothing. She helped her neighbors across the state line anyway, because that is what neighbors do.
Then there is the Imagination Library, the cause closest to her heart.
Her father, Robert Lee Parton, raised twelve children in a small cabin in the Smoky Mountains. He worked as hard as any man in Tennessee, and he never learned to read or write.
So in 1995 she started mailing a free book every month to every preschool child in Sevier County.
The program spread across Tennessee, then across America, then around the world. It has now placed more than 200 million books in the hands of children, each one addressed to the child by name.
Her father lived long enough to see local kids call his daughter “the Book Lady.” Before he passed, he told her the Imagination Library was the most important thing she had ever done. A man who could never read a single page made sure his daughter heard that.
Look closely and you find the same pattern in every one of these stories. She saw a problem with her own eyes, put her own money on the table, and stayed until the work was finished.
She never waited on a government study or a federal grant, and she never asked anyone’s permission to do good.
That is what happens when a person loves the place that raised her and never stops paying the debt.
Her humility matched her generosity.
When Tennessee lawmakers moved to place a statue of her on the Capitol grounds, she asked them to withdraw the bill, saying she did not belong on a pedestal. She turned down the Presidential Medal of Freedom twice rather than turn her name into a political football.
She kept her politics private for six decades, and Americans of every stripe claimed her anyway. She treated waitresses, presidents, coal miners, and reporters exactly the same way.
In an age when our country argues about everything, she may have been the last public figure every American loved.
Her nephew announced her passing after a brief fight with cancer.
Flags across this nation now fly at half-staff for a poor girl from a mountain cabin who gave away more than most governments manage to give.
Her family has asked that anyone wishing to honor her send a donation to the Imagination Library in place of flowers.
There is no better tribute. Put a book in a child’s hands, and part of Dolly Parton keeps working in the world.
She proved over fifty years that one determined soul with an open heart can change the odds for a whole county, and then for a whole country.
May God rest her, and may God comfort the family and the mountain people who loved her first.
Rest in peace, Dolly. 🇺🇸
