Dolly Parton died today, and there are some people whose deaths feel like the dimming of something that has simply always been there. Dolly was one of those people. She was, quite simply, a lightmaker.
Dolly knew poverty. She knew sexism. She knew what it meant to have people underestimate her intelligence because of how she looked, dressed and spoke. She could have responded to all of that by becoming hardened or guarded. Instead, she made music and made people laugh. She gave children books. She supported people who were marginalized. She invested in the community where she grew up and created thousands of jobs. And through it all, she continued to insist, in that wonderfully Dolly way, that people ought to be kinder to one another.
She came from a deeply religious and impoverished Appalachian childhood, one of twelve children growing up in the Smoky Mountains. What I find especially meaningful is that she never seemed to believe honoring where she came from required closing her heart to people whose lives looked different from hers. Her longtime support of LGBTQ+ people is part of that legacy. She wrote and performed the Oscar-nominated “Travelin’ Thru” for Transamerica, a movie about a transgender woman seeking to connect with her son. She later joined her goddaughter Miley Cyrus in recording “Rainbowland,” a song celebrating a world where people can be different and still belong. Long before such support was culturally easy in many of the communities where Dolly was beloved, she was speaking publicly about acceptance.
Then there was the wonderfully practical side of her kindness. Dolly didn’t just sing about growing up poor; she remembered what poverty had meant to her own family and did something about it. Her father couldn’t read, and in 1995 she created the Imagination Library to send free books directly into the homes of young children. What began in her home county in Tennessee eventually spread around the world, and by late 2025 more than 300 million books had been gifted. Three hundred million books. I love thinking about what those books represent—millions upon millions of small invitations to read, imagine, learn and dream.
Her generosity reached far beyond books. She supported hospitals and educational programs, helped communities recover after natural disasters, and donated money to medical research, including research that contributed to the development of a COVID-19 vaccine. She did all of this while writing extraordinary songs, building businesses and becoming one of the most successful entertainers of her lifetime.
Near the end of today’s New York Times remembrance of Dolly, two quotations stood out to me. In talking about open-mindedness and the lessons within “Coat of Many Colors,” she said, “You have to accept everything and everybody.” Decades earlier, talking about the ambition that drove her beyond the Smoky Mountains, she told Rolling Stone, “I wanted to be free.”
Those two ideas belong together.
Dolly wanted the freedom to become herself—the outrageous clothes, enormous hair, ambition, spirituality, business acumen, songwriting, humor, rhinestones and contradictions. She refused to make herself smaller so other people would be more comfortable with her. But what I find especially beautiful is that she extended that same freedom outward. I get to be me, and you get to be you.
That’s bigger than tolerance. That’s generosity.
Today tributes to Dolly are coming from seemingly everywhere: country musicians and rock musicians, actors, LGBTQ+ advocates and people across cultural and political lines. For a woman who grew up in a tiny cabin in the Tennessee mountains dreaming about the worlds that existed beyond them, she somehow became one of those rare people capable of connecting many of those worlds.
Maybe that’s part of what a lightmaker does. They don’t demand that everyone stand in the same place or shine in the same way. They simply make the world a little brighter from wherever they happen to be standing.
Dolly did that with songs and laughter, books and generosity, acceptance and an enormous amount of sparkle. She seemed to understand that becoming unapologetically yourself doesn’t require denying anyone else the freedom to do the same.
So today I’m raising a lantern for Dolly Parton. 🏮✨ Thank you for the music, the laughter, the books, the generosity, the making room, and the light.
Shine on, Dolly. 💗
We Are All Meant to Shine! 
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