How Can I Be More Like Dolly?

The world lost an amazing treasure this week. And in the days since Dolly Parton’s passing, I’ve found myself thinking about something that feels almost uncomfortable to admit. Maybe it took losing her for many of us to stop long enough to fully understand what we had while she was here.

We definitely knew Dolly Parton was great. We witnessed her greatness in real time for decades. We knew the songs. We knew the voice. We knew the hair, the glitz and glamor, the humor and that charming personality. We knew the story of the girl from the mountains of Tennessee who became one of the most recognizable people in the world.

But watching the response to her passing made me realize that perhaps even knowing all of that, we still didn’t completely understand the magnitude of who she was. There has been an extraordinary outpouring of love. Different musical genres. Different generations. Different races. Different religions. Different backgrounds and beliefs. So many of the things that we have often allowed to divide us seemed to become irrelevant.

Everybody loved Dolly. And that made me stop and ask myself why.

It Was Bigger Than the Music

Naturally, as a music lover and singer/songwriter, I started with the music. I began thinking about Dolly’s songs and mentally going through the ones I could immediately name. I got to about ten pretty quickly. Then I stalled. For a second, I questioned how I could be stuck on ten when there are so many. How could someone this iconic, someone whose career spanned generations and whose influence on music is immeasurable, have such an impact when I couldn’t immediately rattle off dozens of her songs?

Then I jumped on Spotify and started looking through her catalog. “Oh yeah.” “Oh yeah!” “Oh, I forgot about that one.” Of course I knew far more Dolly Parton music than I initially remembered. But then something occurred to me. Maybe my inability to immediately name every song wasn’t a diminishing factor at all. Maybe it was something extremely revealing about it.

Dolly Parton gave us music. But music wasn’t who Dolly Parton was.

Dolly Parton was Dolly Parton. And somehow, that was even bigger.

A Lover of People

The more I thought about her, the more I realized that what has always resonated with me about Dolly was her humanity. She loved music, certainly. But she also seemed to genuinely love people. Her compassion was not something that appeared to have been manufactured for a public image. You could trace it back through her upbringing, through the stories she told about her family, through the way she talked about poverty and opportunity, and through what she actually did with the resources her success eventually afforded her. She didn’t just talk about making people’s lives better. She did things that made people’s lives better. And she seemed to possess this remarkable ability to hold deeply personal beliefs without requiring everyone else to share them before she could extend dignity, kindness or love to them.

That matters. Especially now. We live in a world where disagreement increasingly becomes justification for division. We categorize people. We choose sides. We decide who deserves our empathy based upon whether they see the world the way we do.

Dolly seemed to understand something much simpler. People are people. Her kindness didn’t seem contingent upon agreement. Her compassion didn’t require sameness, and her convictions never seemed to prevent her from recognizing the humanity in someone else.

That is a rare kind of greatness.

Why Has This Affected Me So Much?

That’s the question I had. I’ve had heroes. I’ve had musical influences. I’ve had people who influenced my career, my leadership, my creativity and my understanding of success. I’ve admired legends whose work helped shape the person I’ve become. But I don’t remember ever feeling compelled to sit down after one of them passed and write something quite like this.

Dolly’s death has rested differently on my spirit. And the more I’ve thought about it, the more I understand why. I don’t simply admire what Dolly accomplished. I admire who Dolly became.

That’s different, because when I think about her life, I don’t find myself thinking only about what I’d like to accomplish as an artist or in my other professional pursuits. I find myself thinking about the kind of human being I’d like to become. And I keep coming back to one very simple question: How can I be more like Dolly?

Maybe That’s the Call

I don’t say that with any illusion that I possess the aura Dolly Parton carried through this world. I don’t, but I know I aspire to some of the qualities that made her so extraordinary. I want whatever I accomplish in music, business or any other area of my life to ultimately be smaller than the person I became while accomplishing it.

I want compassion to matter. I want empathy to matter. I want how I treat people to matter. I want to be able to stand firmly in what I believe without requiring somebody else to stand there with me before I can love them. I want my life to make somebody else’s life a little better.

Maybe that is one of the greatest things Dolly left us, because something remarkable happened when she died. For a moment, people have come together. Not because someone told us to. Not because we agreed on everything. Not because some movement organized us. We simply recognized goodness. And we mourned it together.

There is something incredibly powerful about that. In a tumultuous time in America and throughout the world, Dolly’s passing has reminded us that there are still qualities capable of transcending the things that divide us.

Kindness. Compassion. Generosity. Humility. Humor. Grace. Love.

Maybe Dolly’s final lesson isn’t simply that we should mourn the loss of those things in her. Maybe we should practice them ourselves.

The Measure of a Life

Dolly Parton was unquestionably one of the great musical forces of our time. She gave us songs that became part of popular culture. She wrote stories that traveled far beyond country music. She became an actress, entertainer, entrepreneur, philanthropist and global icon. But somehow, when I think about her now, none of those titles seems quite big enough. Because the greatest thing about Dolly Parton wasn’t a song. It wasn’t an award. It wasn’t a record sold, a movie made, a business built or a stage conquered.

It was the human being underneath all of it. The caring. The compassion. The empathy. The generosity. The humor. The nurturer. The encourager. The person who seemed determined to leave the world a little better than she found it.

That’s the Dolly I find myself mourning. And that’s the Dolly I hope we don’t lose. Because perhaps the most meaningful tribute we can give someone isn’t simply remembering what they did. It’s allowing the way they lived to change the way we live.

So when the tributes eventually slow down, when our timelines move on, when the news cycle finds another story and this moment of collective grief begins to fade, I hope we remember what brought so many different kinds of people together in the first place.

It wasn’t simply celebrity. It was goodness. And if Dolly’s death does anything for those of us who remain, I hope it challenges us to become better people. I know it has challenged me.

There is a famous phrase forever associated with Dolly Parton that suddenly has an entirely different meaning to me. For the rest of my days, I hope I can wake up every morning and ask myself, from “9 to 5” and long after the workday is done:

How can I be more like Dolly today?

That feels like a legacy worth carrying forward.

Rest well, Dolly.

And thank you.

Will Preston