Dolly Parton is gone, and I have written that sentence a few times now hoping it would start to look normal. And it won’t for a while. She died Tuesday in Nashville at 80, her family announcing the news through her nephew.
It is a shock, even though it should not be. She had been honest with us. She told us about the kidney stones, the procedures, the dizziness, the dehydration.
She canceled the Las Vegas residency in May and explained, in the plainest Partonterms available, that her body needed some rebuilding. Eleven days ago she taped a video for the crowd at Dollywood, apologizing for missing the opening of the park's new ride because her doctor would not let her travel. She sounded like herself.
She was funny about it, because of course she was. And her death comes only a year and a half after she lost Carl Dean, her husband of nearly six decades. She said publicly that the grief had worn her down and worn her out.
I believe that more than I believe any of the medical details. Calling Parton a country music icon is like calling the ocean a body of water. You would be hard pressed to find a single person in this country who did not know exactly who she was and did not, on some level, love her.
In a culture that cannot agree on a sandwich, we agreed on Dolly Parton. Her imprint on country music is permanent. But starting in the late seventies she crossed over into something much bigger, first through music and then through the movies. 9 to 5 in 1980 made her a mainstream American figure, and it opened up a conversation about Parton the feminist that she never fully agreed to join.
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