Tribute to Dolly

 

The best tribute to Dolly Parton I have seen was written by a pastor in Corpus Christi, my Pastor John Roberts. Definitely worth the read:

She died yesterday morning in Nashville. Eighty years old.

And the way the world found out tells you almost everything about who she was.

Her nephew, Bryan Seaver, made the announcement. He had been her head of security for more than twenty years — a job his father held before him. And he said something in that video that I have not been able to shake.

He said Dolly asked him to record it years ago. Before he could fully absorb it as a future reality. She had thought about this day, planned for it, handed it to somebody she loved, and asked him to be the one to say it.

And then he closed with a sentence that only she could have arranged:

She will always love you.

I preached about that woman not long ago — some of you were here — and I did not know then that I would be writing this today.

So let me tell you why I am thanking God this afternoon for a country singer.

A Sack of Cornmeal

She was born in 1946 in a one-room cabin in the Smoky Mountains of east Tennessee.

Her father paid the doctor who delivered her with a sack of cornmeal.

One of twelve children. Slept three to a bed. Wore dresses her mother sewed out of feed sacks — and I do not mean a farmhouse aesthetic from a home-goods store. I mean the actual burlap bags her daddy bought the chicken feed in.

The kids at school made fun of her clothes. Her accent. Where she lived.

And her own teacher once held up her lunch bucket in front of the whole class and asked the other children to guess what was inside, because there was usually only one thing in there.

Biscuits and gravy. Every day.

Now hold that little girl in your mind. Skinny. Hungry. In a feed-sack dress. Being humiliated in her own classroom by a grown adult who should have known better.

And ask yourself honestly what you would have predicted for her.

Most of us, walking past that schoolhouse in 1952, would have shaken our heads and said something kind and condescending. Maybe slipped her mama five dollars. Felt good about it the rest of the afternoon.

And we would have been wrong by about seventy years and three hundred million books.

She Named Her Own Childhood After Genesis 37

Here is the thing I want to talk about, and I do not think most people have ever stopped to notice it.

Of the more than three thousand songs Dolly Parton wrote in her life, the one she said again and again was her favorite — the one she was proudest of — was about a coat.

Her mother made her a jacket out of scraps of cloth people had given the family. Rags. Leftovers. And while she sewed it, she told her little girl the story of a boy in the Bible whose father made him a coat of many colors.

So Dolly wore it to school, proud of it, thinking she was rich.

And the other children laughed at her, because they knew where the fabric came from.

She called the song “Coat of Many Colors.”

Think about what that means. A poor girl in Tennessee took the worst humiliation of her childhood, and instead of hiding it, she filed it under Genesis 37. She looked at a jacket made out of rags and she said:

This is that coat. I am in that story.

She was not wrong.

What Actually Happened to Joseph

Because look at what that coat did in the original.

Jacob makes his boy a coat, and it marks him out, and his brothers hate him for it. Genesis says plainly they could not speak a kind word to him.

And what happens to the coat is the whole story. They strip it off him. They throw him in a pit. They sell him to a caravan for twenty pieces of silver. Then they take that beautiful coat, dip it in goat’s blood, and carry it home to break their father’s heart with it.

The coat that was supposed to mean beloved became the evidence of his death.

And then Joseph goes down.

Slavery in a foreign house.

Falsely accused by a woman who wanted something he would not give her.

Prison.

Forgotten there by a man who promised to remember him — two full years.

Thirteen years, all told, between the pit and the palace.

And at the end of it, in Genesis 50, his brothers come crawling, terrified he will finally settle up. And Joseph says the sentence that holds this entire devotional together:

“As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today.”

Read that last clause slowly. To keep many people alive.

That is not a poem about attitude. That is a body count in the other direction. There was a famine, and Joseph ran the food, and people who would have starved did not.

The boy they mocked for a coat ended up feeding a nation.

Three Hundred Million Books

Now hold that beside what happened to the girl in the feed-sack dress.

She wrote more than three thousand songs.

Eleven Grammys.

Over a hundred million records sold.

She wrote “I Will Always Love You,” and somebody else’s recording of it became one of the best-selling songs in the history of the industry.

Whitney Houston anyone!

She built a theme park in the same mountains her family could not afford to leave, in a county that did not have a stoplight when she was born, and it brings millions of people a year to east Tennessee.

But that is not why I am writing this.

In 1995 she started mailing books to children.

The Imagination Library.

Birth to age five. Free. Every month. It does not matter who you are, what your parents make, or what your zip code is — a book shows up in the mail with your name on it.

As of last year, more than three hundred million books.

Three hundred million.

From a girl whose family paid the doctor in cornmeal.

And in 2020, when this country was falling apart and the big institutions were too skittish to fund early vaccine research, she quietly wrote a million-dollar check to Vanderbilt. That money helped fund the research behind one of the vaccines, and the estimates of American lives saved run into the millions.

The girl they laughed at for her coat ended up keeping many people alive.

Joseph in Genesis 50 and Dolly Parton in Tennessee, and it is the same sentence.

The Part About the Children

And there is one more thing I have to say, and it is the tenderest thing in this whole piece.

She never had a child.

She and Carl Dean were married fifty-eight years.

He died in March of last year.

And they never had children — she talked about it plainly over the years, and she carried it, the way people do.

Proverbs thirty-one says of a woman of valor: her children rise up and call her blessed.

She had none of her own.

And there are millions of grown people in this world today who learned to read from books she mailed them, and who called her the Book Lady before they ever knew she sang.

Church, God did not overlook that woman’s empty arms.

He filled them with a continent’s worth of children she never met.

One of the Good Ones

Now let me say the thing I actually want to say, and I will say it plainly.

She was not a preacher and she never pretended to be.

She was open about her faith and equally open about not being anybody’s judge.

There is a line of hers from an interview years ago that I have thought about more than once:

“I keep saying: if you’re the fine Christian that you think you are, why are you judging people? That’s God’s job.”

I have preached longer sermons that said less.

And I am not standing here canonizing anybody.

That is above my pay grade and it was above hers too. But I will say this out loud, on the day she died:

She was one of the good ones.

In a culture that made a religion out of contempt, she spent seventy years refusing to hate anybody.

In an industry that eats people, she was kind.

She had every excuse to be bitter about where she came from and she made a career out of being grateful for it instead.

Try to name one other famous American that this whole fractured country agrees on.

You cannot do it.

There was one.

What I Am Actually Thanking God For

So here is my prayer this afternoon, and I want you to pray it with me.

Thank You, Lord, for the girl in the cabin.

Thank You that You saw her when a teacher held up her lunch bucket and a whole classroom laughed.

Thank You that the coat they mocked her for turned into the one song she was proudest of writing.

Thank You that You have never once been wrong about who somebody could become.

Thank You for every book that landed in a mailbox in a house where there were no books, for every child who learned to read because a woman from a one-room cabin decided that no kid should grow up the way she did.

Thank You that she thought about this day long enough to hand it to a nephew who loved her and asked him to tell us she would always love us.

And Lord — while we are grateful, would You do the same thing again?

Somewhere out there right now is another kid in a feed-sack dress. Another kid whose teacher is holding up his lunch. Another kid every one of us would write off in about four seconds if we walked past that schoolhouse.

You are not done, and You have never once been wrong.

She left the mountain, and she never once acted like she was better than it.

She was mocked for a coat of many colors, and she turned around and wrote a song about it.

And a whole lot of people who would have gone hungry for words, did not.

You meant it for evil. God meant it for good — to keep many people alive, as they are today.

Rest well, Dolly.

Your Hope Dealer,

Pastor John (Rookie Roberts)

Genesis 37:3–4, 23–24 · Genesis 50:20 · Proverbs 31:28 · Matthew 25:35–40