Requiescat in Pace, Dolly Parton

A very young Dolly singing in Fountain City, Tennessee.

Dolly Parton will be missed here in Appalachia. I don't doubt that such a forward-thinking and cunning operator -- for she was that, as much as she was a darling of everyone and a much-beloved singer and songwriter -- will have set up all the proper contingencies to keep her charity for the poor children of her home running long into the future. She will still be missed for her example. 

Dolly was the same age as my mother, who is still alive. As such mom, who grew up in nearby Bearden, Tennessee, got to watch Dolly from a very young age and all her long career. That show whose (silent) video opens this post was a Cas Walker show, a local politician and shopkeeper to the Knoxville area who used country music and his radio show to advance his position (and thus was a sponsor of such events).*

From her beginnings from the age of 10 as an extra on a local politician's radio show, she progressed to real success as a songwriter first. She then got on with Porter Waggoner's show -- he is usually though incorrectly credited with having the first all-female backup band in country music (in fact it was David Allan Coe who did that first, but he wasn't famous enough yet to be remarked for it). From 1967 to 1974, when she left the show and broke with Waggoner professionally, her duets with him were some of her biggest successes. In 1973 she had a real independent hit with the famous "Jolene" -- thus the name of one of my second cousins' only daughter -- and then went off on her own. The song she wrote about that departure is "I Will Always Love You," a song later more famously covered by another female vocalist.

She had a long and varied career, but what I always keep coming back to in my mind is all the good she did for those growing up poor in the place where she once did. Music has the ability to last forever; some songs are so old that we don't really know when or where they came from. Some of hers may, if not exactly as she wrote them than in the manner of folk songs. Yet her good deeds for the poor of the mountains, that is what I will always remember about her and her life's work. 

Rest in peace.

* Cas Walker was a noted character. Dad's favorite Cas Walker story was from the radio show, The Farm and Home Hour. Shortly after radar guns became a thing that the state police were using, Cas gave an editorial against them on the show. "Some of our best citizens," he said, "are being caught in these traps." 

UPDATE: Widespread mourning.