This week, Dolly Parton’s sister Freida unwittingly broke the internet. “Last night, I was up all night praying for my sister, Dolly,” she told Facebook followers on Tuesday. “She’s strong, she’s loved, and with all the prayers being lifted for her, I know in my heart she’s going to be just fine.” Within minutes, Performative Grief Twitter was in overdrive, keen to read impending tragedy between the lines.
We’ve already lost some of music’s most beloved characters in 2025 (Ozzy Osbourne, Brian Wilson, Marianne Faithfull), and in these times of war-torn hellishness and authoritarian creep, it felt like we couldn’t afford to lose such a beacon of pure and uncynical joy as Dolly Parton. At 79, she’s the country queen of hearts, revered figurehead for the new wave of Americana, and the last bastion of sweet-natured mammarial humour.
AI did its usual thing for truth and transparency, with fake Dolly deathbed pictures doing the rounds. But luckily, just as we began to fear the worst – not just no Parton, but the prospect of an ownerless “I Will Always Love You” somehow getting bequeathed to Sam Smith – Parton appeared in a two-minute video from the set of a commercial for the Grand Ole Opry, declaring, “I ain’t dead yet!”
Promising to stock up the prayers for when she needs them, she explained that she’d developed some health issues during her late husband Carl Dean’s long illness – “I didn’t take care of myself,” she said. “I let a lot of things go” – and that undergoing treatment for “nothing major” had caused her to postpone her September Vegas residency. Another of her sisters, Stella, also confirmed that Parton was being treated for kidney stones – a condition that calls more for alpha-blockers than summoning the overstretched divine. An honest mistake from a well-meaning and genuinely concerned sibling, then. But one from which we all need to learn.
Sadly, we exist in an age when exclusive information equals online currency, paid in hugged hearts and follows and the slow crawl towards influencer megabucks. It’s impossible to overestimate the modern internet’s hunger for celebrity scoops and scandals, no matter how minor or overblown. Health, relationships, addictions or Traitors fees: a new industry of citizen tabloidism has arisen online.
Meanwhile, adding fuel, the simple, olde-worlde concepts of respect, privacy and restraint are kryptonite to the algorithm. It compels artists to lay their lives relentlessly bare, from tour dates to psoriasis, lest – heaven forbid – we start to assume they actually are dead (as happened to Jamie Foxx in 2023, during an understandable social media lull in the wake of a stroke).
The need for such a torrent of fan engagement has utterly eroded all sense of mystery and privacy for all but the biggest acts. Something as previously veiled as minor surgical procedures or neurodivergent diagnoses are easy wins on the socials, signifiers of strength, bravery and solidarity. To be a star in recent years has unavoidably meant signing up for a kind of digital amalgamation of MAFS, Through the Keyhole and Embarrassing Bodies, when all you really wanted to do was demolish your numerous exes in song.
At a time when our feeds are flooded with conflict and negativity from all sides, dragging the global mood into the gammon-red, we could all do without worrying about entirely imagined crises. Not to mention knowing so much about Parton’s urinary tract issues.
If the yo-yoing discussions around Parton this week have done anything, it is exposing the passive intrusions of today’s online world, the vulture lust for endless bad news and celebrity bin-diving. But there is hope for both the private pop legend and the medically squeamish fan. We’re now way past the online exposure saturation point. Now that everybody’s doing it, the majority of artists are no longer reaping the promised rewards from constantly TikToking and Instagramming every aspect of their lives. Online, musicians at many levels have reached a state of frantic futility.
The only way to go, surely, is back to the enigmatic. Perhaps it’s time for everyone to re-embrace information blackout, the unannounced countdown clock and big bang comeback, the tried-and-tested concept of anticipation and reward. To rid our feeds of tedious tattle – if you happen to have insider knowledge of some A-list ingrown toenail, stop, park your Main Character Syndrome and viral aspirations, and consider whether you really want to add to all this bleak grey noise.
The world is a significantly happier place when we just assume that Dolly Parton is fine. So if we could all agree to take a mobile-phone-emergency-siren approach to the wellbeing of such treasured musical icons – ie, just wait for them to tell us when things go nuclear – we’ll all live more carefree lives. And let us pray that the panic around Parton ultimately sets us on the road back to musical mystique.
