Dolly Parton (1946-2026) - RIP - Pop-up episode

 

For Dolly & all who grieve her!
Aired on WTTU on Tuesday, August 25th, 2026 from 5-6pm central time.

Guest poetry reading by P.A. Jones of Alabama.

Jolene
Joshua
Just Because I'm A Woman                                                                                                        9 to 5 - with Kelly Clarkson

Even Cowgirls Get The Blues - with Emmylou Harris & Linda Ronstadt

Peace Train - with Ladysmith Black Mambazo
Long As I Can See The Light - with John Fogerty
Softly and Tenderly - with Emmylou Harris & Linda Ronstadt

Rainbowland - with Miley Cyrus
Freebird - with Lynyrd Skynyrd

𝗗𝗢𝗟𝗟𝗬 𝗗𝗜𝗘𝗗 𝗧𝗢𝗗𝗔𝗬

Dolly Parton died today.

That sentence feels
too small for the occasion.

Too plain.

Like saying
the mountains lost a tree
when the whole damn ridge
has changed shape.

She had been here so long
I had placed her among
the permanent things.

Front porches.

Sunday dinner.

Old women snapping beans
with a radio playing
beside the kitchen sink.

Those Tennessee mountains
rising blue through the morning fog.

Some voices become part
of the country itself.

They settle into the wood.

Get carried through screen doors
and open truck windows.

Follow us down two-lane roads
past little churches,
abandoned filling stations,
and houses where somebody
is still trying to make
one paycheck stretch
all the way to Friday.

Dolly knew those houses.
She came from a cabin
full of children,
hand-me-down clothes,
old hymns,
hard winters,
and the kind of love
that learns how to multiply
when there is never enough
of anything else.

She carried that cabin
everywhere she went.

Carried the smoke from the chimney.

Carried her mother’s singing.

Carried the hills
and the worn-out hands
of people who worked
their whole lives
without seeing their names
written anywhere.

Then she walked beneath
the brightest lights in America
covered in rhinestones
and refused to apologize
for a single inch of herself.

Lord, she was something.

Hair piled halfway to heaven.

A laugh big enough
to fill a room.

A voice that could sound
like Saturday night
and Sunday morning
in the same breath.

People saw the wigs,
the dresses,
the impossible shine.

Dolly saw them looking.

Then she smiled
and went about the business
of owning the whole damn room.

She wrote songs
for women standing
on aching feet
while some fool behind a desk
counted their minutes.

Songs for people
lying awake beside somebody
they were already losing.

Songs for those who loved enough
to let go.

Songs for jealous hearts,
lonely beds,
empty pockets,
and anybody who ever stared
toward the mountains
wondering whether there was
another life beyond them.

She knew a song
could sit beside a person
when words from everybody else
had quit working.

She also knew
a child with a book
might discover a road
leading somewhere
nobody in their family
had ever gone.

So she mailed them books.

Millions of them.

Sent them into trailers,
farmhouses,
apartments,
cabins,
and little bedrooms
where a child opened a cover
and found the world
waiting inside.

She made more money
than the girl in that cabin
could have imagined.

Then she spent a lifetime
reaching back toward children
who were still there.

That may be the truest thing
any of us can do
with whatever light
finds its way to us.

Reach back.

Keep the door open.

Remember the road.

Dolly died today.

Tonight her voice
will come through speakers
in kitchens and trucks
and roadside bars
from Tennessee
clear down through Alabama.

Somebody will turn it up.

Somebody will cry.

Some woman working late
will sing along.

Some little girl
will stand before a mirror,
hold a hairbrush like a microphone,
and believe the room
is already hers.

And somewhere
a child will open
a book with Dolly’s name inside
and begin sounding out
the first sentence
of a life she helped make larger.

That is how a person stays.

In the songs we keep singing.

In the doors we leave open.

In the hands reaching backward
from whatever mountain
we have managed to climb.

The rhinestones will keep shining.

The books will keep arriving.

And the rest of us
will have to decide
what we are going to do
with all the light
she left behind.

- Paul A. Jones