The torrent of love, grief and heartfelt tributes that followed the news of the unexpected death of Dolly Parton last week recognised that this diminutive star with a heart as big as the Appalachian Mountains where she was born was far more than just another entertainer.
Born into what many consider to be abject poverty, the daughter of a father, Robert Lee Parton, who could not read and the fourth of 12 children brought up in a two-roomed shack, Dolly never considered herself poor.
She made that point most strongly in the moving lyrics to Coat of Many Colours, a homage to her mother, Avie Lee, and her roots and a remembrance of a much-loved garment her mother had stitched together from a collection of rags. The autobiographical track tells the poignant story of a young Dolly proudly wearing her patchwork coat to school, only to face the mockery of her classmates.
As Parton famously sang: "Although we had no money / I was rich as I could be
"In my coat of many colors / "My momma made for me."
Her schoolmates didn't see it that way, however: "In my coat of many colors / "I hurried off to school
"Just to find the others laughing / "And making fun of me"
She refused to accept their scorn: "But they didn't understand it / "And I tried to make them see
"That one is only poor / "Only if they choose to be."
While Dolly went on to accrue great fame and wealth, much of which she poured back into communities in the mountains of Tennessee, she never lost sight of that homespun wisdom. It, more than anything else, was at the heart of her most ambitious project, the Imagination Library which has gifted more than 332 million books, including two million in Australia, to children around the world over the past 31 years.
While never ashamed of her family's lack of material possessions during her childhood, Dolly understood that illiteracy was a poverty trap. The ability to read and write is the key to all the doors that slam shut in the faces of anybody who lacks that skill.
Literacy works on so many levels. It is fundamental to education and a good career. It also allows people to explore the thoughts of men and women who lived millennia ago. The Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest surviving written narrative, dates back more than 4000 years but is still read today.
And, of course, the world would be a much greyer place if the visions conjured into being by the genius of Shakespeare, Montaigne, Cervantes and thousands of others had never been set down on paper.
Yet literacy remains out of reach for a staggering number of people. In Australia, benchmark data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics reveals that 3.7 per cent of adults, or roughly 620,000 people, cannot read or write at all, operating at a pre-primary level.
Even more concerning is the sheer volume of functionally illiterate citizens. Approximately 40.5 per cent of Australian adults fall into the lowest two levels of literacy proficiency. Around 44 per cent of the adult population, or more than seven million Australians, lack the minimum literacy skills required to fully participate in a contemporary, knowledge-based society.
Dolly Parton recognised this quiet crisis and dedicated her immense resources to fighting it from the ground up. While Dolly has gone, the candle she has lit will continue to illuminate millions of lives for decades to come.
As will her music and those heartfelt words she poured into thousands of songs; lyrics that tell stories every bit as beautifully and artfully as the written word.
