THE best tribute to Dolly Parton I have seen was written by a pastor in Corpus Christi, Pastor John Roberts.
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 12 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 and 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 and hungry. In a feed-sack dress and being humiliated in her own class by her classmates and teacher.
Of the more than 3,000 songs Dolly Parton wrote in her lifetime, 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” and thought of Genesis 37.
Later, she wrote more than 3,000 songs and won 11 Grammys. She sold over a hundred million records. She wrote “I Will Always Love You,” and Whitney Houston’s recording of it became one of the best-selling songs in the history of the industry.
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.
In 1995, she started mailing books to children: The Imagination Library. Birth to age 5, for 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, she gave away more than 300 million books.
And in 2020, when the United States was falling apart, and the big institutions were too skittish to fund early vaccine research, she quietly wrote a million-dollar check to Vanderbilt University. That money helped fund the research behind the Moderna vaccine, and the estimates of lives saved run into the millions.
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 for 58 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 31 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. God did not overlook that woman’s empty arms. He filled them with a continent’s worth of children she never met.
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.”
She was one of the good ones. In a culture that made a religion out of contempt, she spent 70 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.
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 the 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.
