I JUST REMEMBER DOLLY

by Trudy Giordan. Illustration by Marcel van de Kraats.

We lost her this week.

Dolly Parton died Tuesday, August 25, 2026, in Nashville, at eighty. Even after having watched her build an empire out of a joke for six decades, outlast every trend that was supposed to make her irrelevant, and somehow turn a rhinestone-heavy approximation of a human exclamation point into one of America’s most trusted institutions, the finality of it still doesn’t sit right.

The wig wasn’t hiding the woman. The wig was part of the woman.”

You didn’t discover Dolly Parton. That’s the first thing people forget when they write about her now as though she were a cultural artifact waiting to be decoded. If you were a kid in the '70s, she was just on. She was on the radio in the car; she was on Hee Haw; she was on The Porter Wagoner Show reruns your grandmother had on in the afternoon.

Nobody sat you down and explained the semiotics of the wig.

Thankfully.

Imagine trying to explain Dolly Parton to a seven-year-old. “Well, sweetheart, this is an important commentary on gender, class, sexuality and Southern identity.”

No. The woman had enormous hair and was singing on television. We had things to do.

Early Memories

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For me, Dolly first entered my life through my mother. She was the real fan in the house.

My earliest memory of Dolly isn’t American at all.

It’s Dutch television.

Dolly on Dutch TV

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In 1978, Dolly appeared on the Sonja Barend Show in Holland. I don’t remember the show itself vividly. What I remember is my mother watching it: how drawn she was to Dolly’s music, and the attention she gave her on television.

Dolly came into my life through her first, my mother.

I was too young to understand who Dolly Parton was in America, or why this woman with the enormous hair and impossible clothes mattered. I just knew that my mother cared about her, and that was enough to make me pay attention.

And I remember the Playboy.

Which is a sentence I never expected to write about my childhood memories of Dutch television.

Sonja held up the October 1978 issue of Playboy, with Dolly on the cover, and asked her about the Dolly Parton look-alike contests that were apparently popular in America.

Dolly laughed. She said she was the easiest person in the world to imitate: all you needed was a wig and a flashy outfit.

Honestly, this was an unusually efficient brand strategy.

Dolly said she enjoyed the image and wasn’t as serious about it as people might think.

Then she told Sonja that she had once almost entered a Dolly Parton look-alike contest herself, in a small town where nobody would recognize her, because she thought it would be funny if she entered and lost.

That may be the most Dolly thing imaginable.

She had essentially reverse-engineered the Dolly Parton costume and then handed the instructions to the public.

I was too young to understand why that was funny.

I certainly couldn’t have understood what she was telling us: that Dolly Parton knew perfectly well she was an image. She knew the wig was a wig. She knew the outfit was an outfit. She knew the joke, and she was in on it.

Another detail seems almost absurd to me now. Dolly hated flying. She later said plainly, “I don’t like to fly,” and explained that she traveled by bus whenever she didn’t have to fly.

Yet here she was in Holland, on Dutch television, laughing about people dressing up as her.

I couldn’t have known any of that as a child.

What stayed with me wasn’t really the interview.

It was my mother watching Dolly.

That’s how Dolly entered my life: not as a cultural icon, not even initially as an artist, but as someone my mother loved listening to.

From Family to Pop Culture

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By the time I was old enough to have an opinion about Dolly, she was already part of the cultural furniture.

I didn’t really fall for her myself until I was a teenager. And when I did, it wasn’t the rhinestones or the persona that got me first.

It was the guitar playing and that voice, the way she could make an instrument and a set of vocal cords do something that unmistakably belonged to her and no one else.

That’s a different kind of falling in love with an artist than the wig or the punchlines.

That’s craft, recognized young and never really shaken.

Then 9 to 5 hit theaters in 1980 and something shifted, even if you were too young to clock what. Suddenly she wasn’t just a country voice on the radio. She was a movie star standing between Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin, holding her own, writing the theme song herself, and turning the sound of her acrylic nails against a hard surface into one of the most recognizable rhythms in American pop culture.

Her audience widened again.

Dolly was no longer just somebody my mother listened to.

She was becoming somebody everybody knew.

Every kid I knew could do the “tinkle tinkle tinkle” line from memory, whether they’d seen the movie or not.

That’s culture penetration you can’t manufacture.

That’s just what it was to be alive and paying attention in that decade.

And the audience kept widening. When "9 to 5" became a chart-topping pop hit in early 1981, Dolly was no longer neatly contained within country music.

Islands in the Stream came out in '83 and it was inescapable, playing at every backyard barbecue, every wedding reception, every gas station radio. Nobody was thinking about Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton as a media strategy.

They were just the sound of a summer.

And here’s the part that’s hard to explain to anyone who met her only through the internet’s later, tidier version: there was an edge to how adults talked about her back then that kids picked up on without understanding.

The jokes about her chest. The “dumb blonde” cracks. The way certain men would say her name with a smirk before saying anything else.

It was casual, unremarked, the wallpaper of the era.

She heard it too. She heard it more than anyone. And what’s remarkable in hindsight is that she never seemed to let it become an insult she had to defend herself against.

She got there first.

She made the joke herself.

The people trying to diminish her never seemed actually to win.

By the time Dollywood opened in 1986, she’d become something bigger than a singer to people my age. She was proof that a kid from a one-room cabin in East Tennessee could build an empire and owe no one an apology for how she chose to look while doing it.

Nobody in my house called it feminism.

Nobody called it anything.

She was just Dolly.

And Dolly was one of the good ones.

This was not a political endorsement. There was no yard sign. Nobody had to register with the Dolly Party. She was filed under GOOD, and the filing system seemed remarkably efficient.

Everybody agreed that the way you agree kindness matters, or dogs are good, or Tennessee summers are too hot.

It wasn’t an opinion.

It was just true.

What gets lost in the wig jokes, and what deserves to be said plainly now, is how consistently she extended that generosity beyond the people who looked like her or agreed with her.

In 2016, after North Carolina passed its controversial HB2 law, Dolly spoke out against it while still going ahead with her scheduled performance in the state. Her response was characteristically plainspoken: “I think everybody should be treated with respect. I don’t judge people.” She hoped everybody would get the chance to be who and what they are.

She didn’t need to turn herself into a political brand.

She could say what she believed without making the belief itself the brand.

That distinction mattered.

She could be deeply rooted in the culture that produced her without being trapped by its assumptions. She could be unmistakably Southern without becoming a caricature of Southern politics. She could be religious without making exclusion the price of admission. She could be sexually provocative without seeming particularly interested in scandal.

And somehow she could make people across those divides feel that she belonged to them.

I didn’t fully understand how unusual that was until much later.

In 2024, I stumbled onto Dolly for President, a four-part Omroep MAX series in which Dutch singer Ilse DeLange and television presenter Frank Evenblij travel through Tennessee trying to answer a question that sounds simple and isn’t: why does everybody love Dolly Parton?

The question immediately struck me as both obvious and strange.

Watching two Dutch broadcasters investigate Dolly through Sevierville, Dollywood, and the wider Tennessee world she came from, I found myself looking at a woman I had known since childhood as though I were seeing her for the first time.

Sometimes it takes someone else’s outsider curiosity to make you actually look at what was always just wallpaper.

The Dutch weren’t taking Dolly for granted.

They could see something I had stopped seeing.

They could see the construction.

Because almost everything about Dolly Parton was constructed.

The hair was constructed. The eyelashes were constructed. The clothes were constructed. Even her famously exaggerated look was part of the construction. The persona was constructed.

It's right there in her own name, if you let yourself see it. A dolly isn't born. A dolly is made — stitched together, dressed, given a face, and sent out into the world to be loved by whoever picks it up.

And yet I don't remember ever experiencing her as fake.

She didn’t merely have an image.

She built one.

That’s the part that finally became interesting to me.

Maybe the mistake is thinking that the artificial and the sincere are opposites.

Dolly never pretended Dolly was natural. She understood the performance and never seemed embarrassed by it. She chose the hair. She chose the clothes. She chose the jokes. She exaggerated the very things people had used to reduce her to a punchline, turning the exaggeration into her signature.

And she had already told us this herself.

Back in 1978, sitting beside Sonja Barend, with Dolly’s own Playboy cover between them, she had laughed about how easy it was to imitate her.

All you needed was the wig.

She knew.

She was telling us.

I just wasn’t old enough to understand.

The wig wasn’t hiding the woman.

The wig was part of the woman.

The joke wasn’t covering up some serious person underneath.

The joke was one of the ways the serious person controlled the room.

She made herself.

And then she made that self real.

That’s what I hadn’t understood as a child watching her on Dutch television.

I had thought I was simply watching Dolly.

I was.

But I was also watching someone perform one of the great American tricks: turning self-invention into authenticity.

America is obsessed with authenticity, which is an interesting national hobby for a country that has spent two centuries manufacturing identities at industrial scale.

We like our people “real,” preferably self-made, preferably from a small town, preferably with a hardship story, preferably photographed in denim while standing in front of something made of wood.

Dolly understood the assignment.

She just added rhinestones.

She didn’t pretend the construction wasn’t there.

She practically put it under stage lighting.

And perhaps that is why she could cross so many of the lines that seemed impossible to cross.

Country and pop.

Poor and rich.

Southern and cosmopolitan.

Religious and accepting.

Sex symbol and grandmother.

Businesswoman and fool.

Biblical and rhinestone.

Artificial and sincere at the same time.

She never seemed particularly interested in resolving those contradictions for us.

She just lived in them.

And maybe that’s why the Dutch question stayed with me.

Why does everybody love Dolly Parton?

I don’t think the answer is that she fooled everyone into thinking she was something she wasn’t.

It’s almost the opposite.

She was unusually transparent about the fact that she had made herself.

The hair was real in the sense that it belonged to her, even when it wasn’t growing out of her head.

The persona was real because she chose it.

The joke was real because she understood it.

The woman was real because, underneath all that construction, there was never much mystery about what she valued: work, family, generosity, independence, humor, and the freedom to make a life on your own terms.

Maybe that’s why you trusted her.

She’s gone now, and the wig, the voice, the guitar, the rhinestones, the jokes, the whole six-decade performance that turned out never really to have been a performance in the way we usually mean it — all of it stays exactly as true as it always was.

I didn’t have to discover Dolly. I had to learn how to see her.

Full Circle

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And I keep coming back to that television screen in Holland in 1978.

I don’t remember the program itself.

I remember my mother watching.

I remember Dolly’s enormous hair. I remember the Playboy cover Sonja Barend showed on Dutch TV. I remember she was someone worth paying attention to because my mother was.

I didn’t know what I was looking at then.

I didn’t know that the woman singing “Heartbreaker” and “Baby I’m Burnin’” would become one of the most recognizable people in the world. I didn’t know that the enormous hair and impossible clothes were not an accident but part of a self she had consciously constructed. I didn’t know that, decades later, I would watch two Dutch people travel through Tennessee, trying to understand why America loved her, and realize that I had been asking the same question without knowing it.

I just remember Dolly.

Maybe that’s the thing I finally understand.

I didn’t have to discover her.

I had to learn how to see her.