Readers Share Memories of Meeting Dolly Parton
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- Larry Lipman of Tennessee met Dolly at the late-1970s Country Music Awards, recalling she gave him and three other young volunteers roughly 20 minutes of unhurried, undivided attention despite having no reason to do so.
- Allan Trautman, a California puppeteer, worked on Dolly's 1987 Christmas TV variety episode and described hearing her sing a cappella as 'a sound that I could see,' saying the room filled with a 'golden light.'
- Fabienne Drinkwater, an Australian originally from France, was a 1978 RCA junior publicist who escorted Dolly around Paris to Christian Dior and Galeries Lafayette; Dolly secretly noted her shoe size and later gifted her a pair of boots at the George V hotel.
- Antonio (originally from Kentucky, now in Hanoi) highlighted Dolly's advocacy for women, Black, and LGBTQIA people in the conservative South, plus her support for HIV/AIDS treatment access, the Moderna Covid vaccine's development, and children's literacy through book donations.
- Antoine in London said his 18-month-old son receives one book per month through Dolly's Imagination Library, an initiative he hadn't connected to her until her passing.
- Maya in Australia, a trans woman, credited Dolly's early supportive comments about trans women and LGBT people — decades before it was mainstream — with helping her through bullying in rural 1970s-80s Australia, where she and a friend watched 9 to 5 on a single VHS tape 'a thousand times.'
- Kathy Adams of Utah recalled Dolly opening for Merle Haggard at the Akron Civic Theatre in the mid-early 1970s; one of her brothers later formed a Dolly Parton tribute band called 'Parton Me' in San Francisco.
Why it matters: The tributes reveal Dolly Parton's reach spanned personal encounters across at least four continents and decades of advocacy in the culturally conservative American South, while her Imagination Library still delivers books to children like Antoine's 18-month-old son in London — a philanthropic pipeline that must now outlive its founder. For the country music industry, it sets a model of platform-as-advocacy in hostile terrain.
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