COUNTRY LOVE — Dolly Parton
SINGER-SONGWRITER | PHILANTHROPIST
COUNTRY LOVE has her holding her own fortune: a tarot card marked LOVE, a figure caught mid-dance. It is a strange thing to place in the hands of a woman built almost entirely out of constructed image — the platinum wig, the sequins, the nails lacquered the same red as her lipstick — except that Dolly Parton has always been explicit about the construction. "It costs a lot of money to look this cheap" is her own line, not a critique someone else assigned her. Raised in a one-room cabin in the Smoky Mountains, she played the Grand Ole Opry at thirteen and went on to write thousands of songs, sell more than a hundred million records, and win ten Grammys, while funneling the proceeds into causes rarely associated with rhinestones: a foundation that has mailed free books to children for decades, a million-dollar donation toward COVID vaccine research, open support for LGBTQ rights and Black Lives Matter in an industry that has not always rewarded either. The tarot card is not a contradiction of the wig and the sequins. It is the same operation — a woman who built an unmissable costume, then used the attention it bought her to move money toward things she actually believed in.