Ben R. Atkinson

By now, you’ve heard the news, as we all did last night, about the death of Dolly Parton, country music legend, songwriter, philanthropist, and humanitarian.

Dolly was my musical hero and my North Star. What can we say when we lose our heroes? I will admit this has been a hard message to write. When I heard the news, I was stunned. I knew Dolly had been unwell; we all knew. And we knew she had been putting off her own health issues while caring for her husband of over 50 years, Carl Dean, who passed in 2025. But we still felt Dolly would live forever. We didn’t imagine a world without her. And now here we are, mourning her loss, yet at the same time lucky to have had Dolly in our lives.

Not in living memory, I think, have we lost a public figure so universally adored and admired. Tributes poured in from all corners of the world, from musicians, politicians, fellow artists, and our own friends and family. Everyone had their own special memory of Dolly, it seems. One of the greatest country musicians of all time, but more than that, one of the greatest musicians and artists of the whole 20th century.

And Dolly worked right up to the end. Just days ago, on Friday, when she was admitted to the hospital, she was still giving an interview to People magazine about her upcoming projects. A few days before that, she recorded two video messages, one for the opening of a new ride at Dollywood and the other to accept the ACM Poet Award. Next month, she was due to receive the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Americana Music Association.

So much has been said about Dolly, so many great tributes, more than I can say here. But I will try and sum up my thoughts. Dolly was universally Dolly, the same in person as you saw in the media. She was an amazing musician; we know that. She wrote “I Will Always Love You” and “Jolene” on the same day! After leaving the Porter Wagoner show in the late 60s, she spent two years paying back the $1m court settlement, almost all the money she earned at the time, yet it was the right decision for her future career. Dolly didn’t talk much about it publicly; instead, she drove away from that office, and as the sky cleared over the highway in front of her, she got an idea for a song. It is one of her best, in my opinion, and Dolly often quoted it as amongst her favourites in her catalogue: “Light of a Clear Blue Morning”. How fitting then that her last release earlier this year, to mark her 80th birthday, was a re-recording of the song featuring friends including Reba McEntire and Lainey Wilson.

Beyond music, Dolly was a philanthropist and humanitarian; she founded the Imagination Library, in part because her own father couldn’t read, and in her lifetime distributed over 300 million books to children around the world. Her father, it turns out, was more proud of that than her music, calling Dolly “The Book Lady”. In 2020 at the height of the pandemic, Dolly released “When Life Is Good Again” a rallying cry for us all to come together amid the biggest global health crisis in a century. Later, she donated $1m to the development of one of the several COVID vaccinations that were administered to populations around the globe. Likewise, in 2024, when Hurricane Helena hit the East Tennessee mountain communities, Dolly again donated $1m to relief efforts.

Next month, in October 2026, Dolly’s museum and hotel “Songteller” will open in downtown Nashville. It’s a fitting tribute and a pilgrimage site for her many legions of fans. And next year, her life story will open on Broadway as “Dolly: An Original Musical”, revealing previously unknown parts of Dolly’s story and featuring new songs alongside her classic back catalogue. I will be there – I hope you will too.

Sleep well, Dolly. We will always love you.

Ben Atkinson
27 August 2026
Lincoln, UK

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