Dolly Parton was our fairy godmother
by Pauline Park

Dolly Parton died of cancer on 25 August 2026. I was actually in a group meeting at my local senior center that Tuesday and I remember the moment when the woman facilitating the group session announced it,  with “Jolene” playing in the background.

I’ve never been particularly interested in country music but I love Dolly Parton. Dolly not only transcended the ‘country & western’ musical genre, she was the rare figure who appealed to Americans across all political divisions. Donald Trump responded to the news of her death (announced by her nephew) by ordering flags flown at half mast from federal government buildings. Newspapers across the country and around the world put Dolly on their front pages. Celebrites who knew her and had worked with her posted condolences as did those who didn’t know her personally.

Dolly’s death made front pages of newspapers across the country and around the world.

The day after Dolly’s death, the Wilderness Society posted (8.26.26):

“Dolly Parton’s deep connection to the Great Smoky Mountains inspired a lifelong appreciation for nature, community and giving back. In a National Geographic interview, Dolly urged people to take better care of the natural world, saying, “We should pay more attention. We’re just mistreating Mother Nature — that’s like being ugly to your mama. We need to take better care of the things that God gave us freely. And that we’re so freely messing up.”
As we remember Dolly’s extraordinary life, we’re also reminded why protecting the places that inspire us matters, so wildlife can thrive, future generations can make memories of their own and everyone can experience the freedom of the outdoors. 💚 Rest in peace, Dolly.

Even the billionaire J.K. Rowling posted a tribute to Dolly. The irony of Rowling’s post was not lost on members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) community, given her relentless attacks on the transgender community. I posted about Rowling’s tribute to Parton on my Facebook page and something extraordinary happened: the post went ‘viral,’ garnering more than 3,700 views — rare for me, especially since Facebook began shadow banning me over my Palestine posts.

In stark contrast to the billionaire “Harry Potter” creator’s vicious transphobia, Dolly Parton was a stalwart supporter of the entire LGBTQ community — including the ‘T’ in ‘LGBTQ.’ In fact, Dolly’s long-term chauffeur was a transman.

As Thought Catalog reported after Dolly’s death, “Jason Pirro drove for and assisted Dolly Parton for more than 30 years, a working relationship that outlasted the 1990 tabloid story that tried to expose him. That July, the supermarket tabloid Star ran a “sex change shocker” about a trans man in Dolly’s limo, using the deadnaming, exploitative language of the era. Pirro’s own words in the piece were unbothered: “Dolly has been good to me… Dolly knows all about me.” Trans community publications quickly reclaimed the story. The XX Club, a Hartford support group, ran it in the August 1990 issue of its newsletter Twenty Minutes, and Lou Sullivan’s pioneering FTM Newsletter preserved similar material as rare proof of a major star’s acceptance at a time of almost no trans visibility. Sullivan died of AIDS-related complications in 1991. Parton kept Pirro close long after. She thanked him by name in the liner notes of her 2016 album “Pure & Simple” and credited him in her 2023 book “Behind the Seams.” In her 1994 memoir she wrote that if she hadn’t been a woman she’d have been a drag queen, and that everything she knew “about sex-change operations” she learned from her good friend Jason. Parton died Tuesday, Aug. 25, at 80. In the days since, queer and trans fans have circulated Pirro’s story again as one more piece of a legacy she spent decades living out loud.”

But Dolly wasn’t without her critics; two days after her death, on August 27, the Vocal Politics Facebook page posted this critique:

Crónicas Mexicanas posted on Facebook, “In 1980, at the height of her fame, Dolly Parton recorded a song about 28 Mexican farmworkers whose names nobody had bothered to write down. This is their story. On January 28, 1948, a chartered DC-3 took off from Oakland, California, carrying Mexican farmworkers back toward the border. Some had crossed without papers. Others were braceros whose work contracts had simply run out — part of the program that brought hundreds of thousands of Mexican laborers north to work American fields. The plane went down in Los Gatos Canyon — not the Silicon Valley town most people picture, but a remote stretch of Fresno County, west of Coalinga. Thirty-two people lost their lives that day: the pilot, the co-pilot, the stewardess, an immigration guard, and 28 Mexican farmworkers. The next morning, the New York Times printed the names of the four Americans.

The other 28 were listed only as ‘deportees.’ In New York, a folk singer named Woody Guthrie read that report and could not let it go. He sat down and wrote a poem for the men and women whose names his country had not bothered to learn. Years later, a schoolteacher named Martin Hoffman set those words to music. Pete Seeger carried the song around the world. And in 1980, Dolly Parton put it on ‘9 to 5 and Odd Jobs’ — the same album as her signature hit, on a record filled with songs about working people. But here is the part almost nobody knows. For 65 years, those 28 souls lay in a mass grave at Holy Cross Cemetery in Fresno, beneath one small, blank headstone. No names. Nothing.

Then a Fresno writer named Tim Z. Hernandez — himself the son of farmworkers — went looking. He spent years in dusty archives, old newspaper rooms, and small Mexican villages, tracking down every single name and finding the families they left behind. On September 2, 2013, a granite memorial was unveiled at that grave. Every name carved into the stone. A border of 32 leaves — one for each person on board. Some 600 people came to stand there. Woody Guthrie’s song ended by saying they would never have a name. Sixty-five years later, they do. And in 2024, a second marker was placed at the canyon itself, so that anyone passing through would know exactly who fell there.

Say their names.

“While she wasn’t reading Karl Marx, she was a card-carrying member of multiple artists’ unions for nearly sixty years. Dave Pomeroy, president of American Federation of Musicians (AFM) of the United States and Canada Local 257 in Nashville, saluted her commitment to her fellow musicians,” noted Amber A’Lee Frost quoting Pomeroy as saying, “Dolly and her team consistently filed AFM union contracts for gigs, sessions, and tours, ensuring that the bands, singers, and studio musicians working alongside her received the benefits of union membership” (Amber A’Lee Frost, “The People’s Dolly,” Jacobin, 31 August 2026).

Dolly was once asked how should would like to be remembered and she replied, “I’d like to be thought of as a decent human being, just a regular person. When you think of me when I’m gone, I’d like you to smile, to think, Oh, she was funny, or, Oh, she had a good sense of humor, you know, when she was sad, she’d make a joke about it. I always say I’m a workhorse that looks like a show horse. I just hope I leave something good behind for other people to enjoy and to draw from.”