No one ever made me aware of Dolly Parton; she’s simply always been. When I was born in December 1977, she was part of the American atmosphere. Her duet with Kenny Rogers, “Islands in the Stream,” came out when I was five years old, and their album Once Upon a Christmas followed the next year. My parents played that record on repeat until, somewhere along the way, their voices became intertwined with the spirit of Christmas.
So, when word came out of Nashville yesterday that Dolly had died, I felt, like so many others, that we’d lost much more than an American music icon. Within hours, tributes poured in from country singers and rock musicians, actors and politicians, writers and others whose attachment to Dolly has very little to do with country music. Today, much of the nation is grieving someone they’ve never met. What was it about Dolly that made it possible for people who usually aren’t capable of sharing politics, theology, or even a common vocabulary to share her?
Ten years ago, Jad Abumrad, the creator of Radiolab, became fascinated by the breadth of that affection. He’d never given Dolly much attention until he saw her perform in Queens in 2016. The presidential campaign had American public life feeling especially raw, and he noticed the crowd: drag queens, evangelical Christians, hipsters, and people whose lives otherwise seemed unlikely to overlap, all waiting to see the same woman. The scene reminded him of a papal visit, he later said. It felt as though people had “elected her in their hearts,” and his curiosity about that eventually became the nine-part podcast Dolly Parton’s America.
