NASHVILLE TENN (ACME NEWS) — Dolly Parton, who turned an impoverished childhood growing up in the Great Smoky Mountains into seven decades of music, film and philanthropy, died Tuesday in Nashville after a brief battle with cancer, her family said. She was 80.
Her nephew, Bryan Seaver, confirmed the death in a video message posted to her social media accounts, speaking on behalf of the Parton and Owens family.
Most of the world knew Parton as the famous country singer behind iconic hits like “Jolene,” “9 to 5” and “I Will Always Love You,” and the name behind Dollywood, her own East Tennessee theme park. But to more than 3 million children, she was known as the book lady.
Rather than let her millions in earnings pile up quietly in the market, Parton spent decades sending millions back to Appalachia and into causes she cared about personally, chief among them literacy. She credited her decades-long efforts against illiteracy to her father, Robert Lee Parton, who never learned to read or write and lived much of his life ashamed of it.
“Daddy was a very smart man, but he was ashamed that he couldn’t read or write,” Parton told Oprah Winfrey in 2020. “I remember thinking, ‘I need to do something.'”
That something became Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, launched in 1995 with an initial order of fewer than 2,000 books mailed to local children. The program grew far larger in scale, but the model never changed. For the next 31 years the organization mailed one free book every month to a child, from birth until their fifth birthday, with no income or application requirements beyond an address and a name.
The Imagination Library became the flagship initiative of the Dollywood Foundation. By 2006, the registered nonprofit had mailed its millionth book; by the time of Parton’s passing, it was gifting more than 3 million books a month to children, with Penguin Random House as its exclusive publisher. In total, the program has gifted more than 332 million books to over 3.1 million children across five countries: the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland and Australia.
The program picked up a run of honors over the years, including the Library of Congress’s Best Practices award in 2014, its Rubenstein Prize in 2021, and the Eric Carle Angel Award and Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy, both in 2022. Parton marked the program’s 100 millionth book in 2018 by delivering it herself to the Library of Congress.
The Imagination Library was only one piece of a giving record that stretched back to 1988, when Parton founded the Dollywood Foundation. Its earliest signature initiative, the 1991 Buddy Program, paid $500 to pairs of Sevier County seventh- and eighth-graders who both stayed in school through graduation. She later gave $1 million to Vanderbilt University Medical Center in 2020 to help fund research that contributed to Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine, provided direct cash relief to families displaced by the 2016 Great Smoky Mountains wildfires, and in 2022 received a $100 million charitable grant from Jeff Bezos, which she funneled largely back into literacy and children’s causes.
“I just give from my heart,” Parton said while accepting the Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy in 2022. “I don’t do it for attention. But look — I’m getting a lot of attention by doing it.”
In a letter posted to the Imagination Library’s website, Parton recalled her father telling her, before he died, that the program was probably the most important thing she had ever done — a verdict she said meant everything, given that she’d built the whole effort as a tribute to him.
By the time of her own death, that tribute had outgrown her and the man who inspired it many times over: a small staff in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, roughly 2,500 local community partners and thousands of volunteers in the five countries the program serves. She credited her local partners directly. “I have not done this alone,” she wrote. “The real heroes of our story are the thousands of local organizations who have embraced my dream and made it their own.”
The Dollywood Foundation said Tuesday that mission would continue without her. “Dolly often said that she had been blessed far beyond anything she ever dreamed possible, and she believed deeply that those blessings came with a responsibility to give something back,” Jeff Conyers, the foundation’s president, said in a statement. “While we are heartbroken by her loss, the mission she gave us is as clear today as it has ever been, and we will carry it forward for generations to come.”
Parents interested in enrolling a child can visit imaginationlibrary.com and follow the steps to check availability and sign up.
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