Dolly Parton for the People

 

 "All that barely begins to describe how Dolly Parton spent her days. She also starred in several movies, at least three of which are good; wrote or co-wrote a handful of memoirs, several children’s books, a few cookbooks, and one novel; and created a sprawling business empire that made her into not only the most famous export of Sevier County but also its largest employer. To honor her father, who never learned to read, she started a charity, the Imagination Library, that sends a free book every month to roughly one in seven preschool-age American children. That would have been plenty; richer people usually do far less. But, when her home county was devastated by wildfires in 2016, she sent a thousand dollars a month for six months to every family that had lost a home, and, when the coronavirus came around four years later, she donated a million dollars to help fund the development of a vaccine. As her fellow country-music stars Montgomery Gentry once sang, that’s a life you can hang your hat on."

 read article by Kathryn Schulz