My cousin tells a story: Several years before I was born, she was sitting on our great-grandmother’s lap at her modest home in a hollow in Eastern Kentucky. It was the late 1970s, when Dolly Rebecca Parton was well on her way to conquering the worlds of pop, Hollywood and business. They were watching a rerun of “The Porter Wagoner Show,” the program that had helped launch Dolly to country music stardom, on a little TV set using rabbit ears, when she appeared. Even though our granny was, like all people in the mountains, well acquainted with Dolly by that point, she was still transfixed. Using the descriptive phrasing that was common then among older people, she said, “That is the prettiest little girl I have ever seen.”
It was a simple, truthful observation from a woman who herself knew the bleaker side of life, birthing and raising 11 children in a time when money was scarce and hard work provided barely enough to scrape by. But as news of Dolly’s death at the age of 80 from cancer sinks in, I keep returning to it, thinking about its meaning. The singer-songwriter from Locust Ridge, Tennessee, whose songs became an indelible part of American life and who performed all over the world in places grand and humble, was beautiful in every sense of that overused word, and based on the accolades she is now receiving, only the most bitter of contrarians would disagree.
