What Dolly Taught Us
I knew Dolly Parton meant a lot to me when I wrote “And God Said, Well Hello Dolly.” What I didn't fully appreciate was how much she meant to so many of you.
The response since I played the song on the radio has been overwhelming. I've heard from people who said it made them cry, people who told me stories about what Dolly meant to them, and people who simply wanted to say thank you for putting into words some of what they were feeling. I wrote the song because I wanted to honor someone I had admired practically my entire life, but your reaction made me start thinking about something beyond the music.
Why did this one woman mean so much to so many people?
There have been singers with extraordinary voices, entertainers who sold millions of records, movie stars who became household names, and celebrities who accumulated fortunes. Dolly did all of those things, but I don't think that's why people felt such a personal connection to her. I think it was because somewhere along the way, while becoming one of the most recognizable people in the world, she never stopped being Dolly.
My connection to her goes back almost as far as I can remember. I started watching Dolly when I was about 5 years old because my dad watched Porter Wagoner. Truthfully, I think Dad was a little bit in love with Dolly, and I suspect he wasn't alone. She had that effect on people. I watched her career grow from those early television appearances into something nobody could have imagined at the time.
Decades later, I had the opportunity to meet her at a Ford awards dinner. By then she wasn't simply a country singer anymore. She was Dolly Parton, known all over the world, and I suppose I expected there might be some distance between the woman I'd watched on television all those years and the superstar standing in front of me.
There wasn't.
She was just as sweet in person as I had always imagined she would be.
I've met a lot of famous and successful people through the years, and fame affects people in different ways. Some people spend their entire lives trying to become important, and once they succeed, they want to make certain everybody knows it. What struck me about Dolly was that she never seemed embarrassed by where she came from or interested in pretending she was something she wasn't.
She grew up in a tiny cabin in the Smoky Mountains in a family with very little money and a whole lot of children. She could have treated that poverty as something to leave behind once the money and fame arrived. Instead, she talked about it, sang about it, laughed about it, and eventually used her success to help the place and the people she came from.
There's lesson number one, although Dolly probably never intended it to be one: Never become so successful that you're embarrassed by the person you were before anybody knew your name.
I've always admired that.
Maybe it's because the automobile business taught me something similar. Titles change. Bank accounts change. Buildings get your name put on them and eventually somebody else's name replaces yours. None of those things changes where you started or the people who helped you along the way. If success requires pretending you got there by yourself, you probably learned the wrong lesson from success.
Dolly understood something else that I think is even more important: success gives you an opportunity to do something for somebody besides yourself.
Her Imagination Library began with a deeply personal reason. Dolly's father couldn't read or write, and she wanted children to have opportunities he never had. What began in her home county in Tennessee grew into a program that has put books into the hands of millions of children.
Think about that for a moment. She took something that had been a limitation in her own family and turned it into an opportunity for families she would never meet.
That's a pretty good definition of giving back.
You don't have to have Dolly Parton's money to do that. Most of us will never be able to fund a worldwide literacy program, but we can help one person. We can encourage one kid. We can give somebody a second chance, write a check we can afford, make a phone call, mentor somebody starting out, or simply notice when another human being could use some help.
The size of the gift isn't nearly as important as understanding that what we've been given isn't necessarily intended to stop with us.
There's another quality Dolly had that I find increasingly valuable these days. She managed to be loved by people who agreed on almost nothing else.
Think about how rare that has become.
We live in a time when we're encouraged to divide ourselves into groups and then become suspicious of everybody in the other groups. Politics, religion, geography, age, race, income—sometimes it seems as though we're constantly being handed another reason not to like each other.
Dolly never seemed particularly interested in playing that game.
She had beliefs and convictions, but she didn't seem to need you to agree with every one of them before she'd treat you with kindness. She could disagree without becoming disagreeable, and she understood something we're in danger of forgetting: You don't have to approve of everything about another person to care about them.
I wish we could bottle some of that.
She also knew how to laugh at herself. Dolly knew exactly what people saw when she walked into a room, and she was usually the first person to make the joke. The hair, the clothes, the makeup—she wasn't trying to fool anybody. She once joked that it cost a lot of money to look that cheap, which tells you almost everything you need to know about her sense of humor.
There's tremendous confidence in being able to laugh at yourself.
The older I get, the more I believe one of the greatest freedoms in life is becoming comfortable with who you are. Not thinking you're perfect. Not believing you have all the answers. Just reaching the point where you don't need everybody else's approval to be comfortable in your own skin.
Dolly seemed to figure that out a long time ago.
But perhaps the thing that stays with me most is how she made people feel.
That's what I remember from meeting her, and judging from the response I've received to the song, it's what millions of other people remember too. People may admire talent, wealth and success, but they form emotional connections with kindness. Years later, we may forget exactly what somebody said to us, but we rarely forget whether they made us feel important, welcomed or loved.
Most of us will never write a song heard around the world, sell out an arena, star in a movie or have our name in lights. Our passing won't make headlines, and flags won't be lowered because we're gone.
But every one of us can do the things I came to admire most about Dolly Parton.
We can remember where we came from. We can help somebody who can't help us back. We can disagree without becoming disagreeable. We can laugh at ourselves. We can stay humble when things go well, and we can make people feel a little better after spending time with us than they did before.
That's quite a legacy when you think about it.
Writing “And God Said, Well Hello Dolly” started as my way of saying goodbye to someone I'd admired since I was a little boy sitting near my dad watching Porter Wagoner. I thought I was writing a song about Dolly going to Heaven.
After hearing from so many of you, I think I understand it a little differently.
Maybe it was also a reminder to those of us still here.
Heaven gained one of the greatest voices country music ever produced. But down here, I think what we'll miss most isn't just the voice.
It's the way she used it.
Straight Talk and Honest Answers — always.
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August turned out to be a BIG month in the auto industry, and I’ll have the full report for you next week, but I think the automakers have found the sweet spot when it comes to incentives. September is traditionally the time when the factories and the dealers get really serious about moving the prior year models, in this case 2026s..jpg?upscale=true&width=1200&upscale=true&name=time-give-up-car-advice-jerry-chatgpt-plus%20(1).jpg)
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Today, I recount stories from when I was in the Ford business and our ad group did sports sponsorships in DFW. I enjoyed this work and the wheeling & dealing that came along with it.
