Hello, God! … In Memory Of Dolly Parton

When the king of Afrobeat, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, died on August 2, 1997, the world stood still. He had conquered the music world from Africa, reinventing African jazz in his own unique way and wielding his lyrics as a weapon of social emancipation.

Michael Jackson’s death on June 25, 2009, also shook the world, especially considering that he was at the height of his glory and only 50 years old. The King of Pop redefined the concept of dancing, revolutionising James Brown’s electric moves with a touch of the extraterrestrial.

Famous Deaths

The revolving door between mortality and the hereafter has hosted many notable passers-through in the last 15 years: Amy Winehouse, 2011; Whitney Houston, 2012; B.B. King, 2015; Prince, 2016; David Bowie, 2016; George Michael, 2016; Chuck Berry, 2017; Don Williams, 2017; Aretha Franklin, 2018; Hugh Masekela, 2018; Manu Dibango, 2020; Eddie Van Halen, 2020; Kenny Rogers, 2020; Tina Turner, 2023; Quincy Jones, 2024.

Star-studded as the modern music scene has been, it will be hard to find another contemporary songwriter with as much cross-cultural and trans-ideological appeal as the woman who combined intense Christian faith with folksy fellow-feeling and a perpetual investment in everlasting youth. Her name was Dolly Parton.

In all, she wrote an estimated 3,000+ songs throughout a career that lasted a little over six decades. Out of her massive output, she has officially recorded and released around 450 to 500 of her own compositions, including such iconic tracks as “I Will Always Love You” (later famously redone by Whitney Houston), “Jolene”, “Coat of Many Colors”, and “9 to 5”. Twenty-five years ago, in 2001, she was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in recognition of her prolific songwriting output.

I am always fascinated by the lives of celebrities who were so rich they had more than money. What coursed through my mind when the announcement of Parton’s death hit the airwaves was the great example of generosity she left for the world to emulate in a remarkable life.

Philanthropy

Dolly Parton’s philanthropic record includes a wide range of charitable initiatives, donations, and direct community support. Her Imagination Library, which was founded in 1995 in honour of her father, mails free, high-quality books monthly to children from birth until age five. It has so far distributed over 300 million books across the United States, Canada, the UK, Ireland, and Australia.

In 2020, she donated $1 million to the Vanderbilt University Medical Center, which directly helped fund the development of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine. She raised $700,000 to assist communities affected by the 2021 Tennessee floods. In 2024, she donated $1 million personally, matched by another $1 million from her Dollywood businesses, to assist disaster relief across East Tennessee.

She made donations towards educational support and high school retention, employee scholarships for higher education, paediatric cancer research, and wildlife conservation of bald eagles and reinvested earnings—including royalties from songs like “I Will Always Love You”—into local business properties and historic districts to support community economic development.

She was the home girl who ensured that the ordinary folk in her environment shared in her fortune. If that is the only lesson the world can learn from her, it would still have been a remarkable one. But her entire life itself was a grass-to-grace poem packaged in a curvy, buxom, mannequin-perfect visage.

Cosmetic Surgeries

Perhaps the only vanity she permitted herself was her insistence on physical perfection, which made her undergo plastic surgery several times to spruce up her looks. She viewed cosmetic enhancement as an ongoing maintenance routine, famously joking, “If I see something sagging, dragging, or bagging, I’m going to go get it stuck, tucked, or plucked.”

Ever candid in a childlike manner, she had admitted to doing facelifts, blepharoplasty (eyelid surgery), breast implants/lifts, liposuction, and excess skin removal aside from non-surgical procedures like Botox injections, dermal fillers, and lip collagen injections.

She was so light-hearted about it, quipping, “I may look fake, but I’m real where it counts.”

Her heart was where it counted. For almost 60 years, she was married to Carl Dean, an extremely reclusive man who ran an asphalt-paving business and preferred rock to country music. He rarely appeared in public, leading to persistent tabloid urban legends that he didn’t actually exist. They had no biological children.

She had enough love to share with the rest of humanity, and that is why, without ever having the benefit of personal contact, this writer, born into a different race half a world away, feels we must imbibe the deeper lessons of a life so richly blessed and so massively charitable.

Relatable Narratives

I make bold to say that her most popular song across all faiths in Nigeria is “Coat of Many Colors” because it vividly illustrates themes of poverty, love, and resilience. Interestingly but not surprisingly, it was a biographical song. Dolly was the fourth of 12 children born to Avie Lee and Robert Lee Parton who lived in a tiny, two-room log cabin on Locust Ridge in Sevier County, Tennessee, without electricity and running water.

Robert Lee Parton was a sharecropper and tobacco farmer who also worked construction jobs while his wife managed the household, cooked meals from basic staples, and made clothes for the children. Cash was always a problem, so much so that Dolly’s father paid the doctor who delivered her with a sack of cornmeal.

“Coat of Many Colors,” therefore, did not drop from the sky. It was a lived experience. In a world where about 1.1 billion people live in acute multidimensional poverty across developing countries, the song resonated well. Parton was vocalising the sentiments of the wretched of the earth, irrespective of geographical location.

Her critics argued that she was glamorising poverty. Well, what is there to glamorise about wealth in an unfeeling world of one millionaire amidst a million beggars? Parton’s ability to convert her experiences into a relatable narrative solidifies the song’s place in both music history and sociology.

Supplication

In the midst of the doom and gloom of the 9/11 terror attacks in the United States, only a Dolly Parton could have come up with the composition of ‘Hello God,’ which is at once a prayer to which everyone can relate and a passionate reaching for the celestials in the midst of profound vulnerability and inconsolable grief.

The lyrics of ‘Hello God’ need to be heard again and again by the merchants of forever wars and mass murders all over the world, lest we self-destruct. Rather than offering rigid dogma, the song voices genuine human helplessness, showing that doubting during a crisis is a universal human experience. She wonders if any human being could ever claim to be fighting for God. Apparently we have abused God’s gift of free will.

‘Hello God’ echoes the way she had lived her life—searching for hope during difficult times. The millions of Nigerians who adore Dolly Parton will, no doubt, find her song a good companion as they confront the ‘apocalyptic’ uncertainties of the 2027 general elections. They might even domesticate the lyrics: “Hello, God, are you out there? Will you save us from the precipice like before?”