Dolly Parton died Tuesday in Nashville, Tennessee, at age 80, following a brief battle with cancer. Her nephew, Bryan Seaver, announced her death on Instagram, writing that she “departed her Earthly life today at the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center surrounded by loved ones.”
In the days since, tributes have rolled in from across the country and the world. Murals have gone up in her honor, and the Empire State Building was lit pink in her memory. In Nashville, Tennessee, Gov. Bill Lee has thrown his support behind a growing push to rename the city’s airport “Dolly Parton International,” though the idea runs up against airport policy, which normally reserves renaming for people with a direct connection to aviation.
But Parton’s reach went well beyond music. Two of her lesser-known legacies, one in early childhood literacy, the other in public health, are just as central to how people are remembering her this week.
A library that fits in a mailbox
In 1995, Parton launched Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, a program that mails one free book a month to children from birth to age five, regardless of their family’s income. She started it in her home county in Tennessee, inspired by her father, who never learned to read or write because he’d had to leave school to work on the family farm.
Three decades later, the program operates across the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Australia, and Ireland, and has distributed more than 300 million books. In lieu of flowers, Parton’s family has asked that donations be made to the Imagination Library.
The country star behind a COVID vaccine
Parton’s other major legacy might be the more surprising one. In April 2020, as the pandemic was just beginning to spiral, she donated $1 million to Vanderbilt University Medical Center, where researchers were working with the drugmaker Moderna on an early COVID-19 vaccine. The gift became known as the Dolly Parton COVID-19 Research Fund and helped support the vaccine’s earliest stages of development.
The donation happened almost by accident. Parton had gotten to know Dr. Naji Abumrad, a Vanderbilt physician, after a 2013 car accident left her with minor injuries. The two stayed in touch, and in the spring of 2020, Abumrad told her about the vaccine research underway at the university. She wrote about it on Instagram at the time: “My longtime friend Dr. Naji Abumrad, who’s been involved in research at Vanderbilt for many years, informed me that they were making some exciting advancements towards research of the coronavirus for a cure.”
When Moderna’s trial results came back strong that November, people online ran with the idea that Dolly Parton had helped save the world. A Northeastern University professor even recorded himself singing a reworked version of “Jolene,” retitled “Vaccine,” that spread widely online.
Parton got her own first dose the following March, filming herself getting the shot at Vanderbilt and telling viewers, “I just want to say to all of you cowards out there, don’t be such a chicken squat. Get out there and get your shot.” She’d waited a few weeks after becoming eligible, she said at the time, because she didn’t want it to look like she was “jumping the line” just because she’d donated.
Asked afterward what it meant to have played a role in the vaccine’s success, Parton kept it simple: “I just wanted it to do good. Evidently, it is.”
If anything, Parton’s impact is even greater than what you might think when the only thing you remember about her is her hit songs and sparkles. Her legacy is a collection of books that have found their way into mailboxes in five different countries, and a vaccine funded because a friend happened to mention the research to her — an oeuvre built as much on giving away money as making it. If the push to rename Nashville’s airport after her succeeds, it would be a fitting tribute.
Sources
https://people.com/dolly-parton-died-after-a-brief-battle-with-cancer-her-team-confirms-12067930
https://www.foxnews.com/live-news/country-legend-dolly-parton-dead-80