Dolly Parton made a lot of things across her 60-plus-year career: massive hit songs, a theme park, a children’s literacy initiative that gave away over 300 million books, movies of both the smash-hit and cult classic variety. But she shied away from making political statements.
This might seem like an odd thing to say about a country star whose coiffed blonde wig inched close to the heavenly host up until her death on Tuesday at 80, a down-home diva whose songs made her identifiable by just a mononym, whose blindingly bedazzled, highly structured outfits made her recognized by just her silhouette. Parton preferred to let her closet make the statements, while quietly building a kind of everybody-love-everybody progressivism that promoted equality and kindness while remaining mostly off-the-record.
