A Message from the Family of Dolly Parton

Posted on August 25, 2026 by Stella

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12 Responses to A Message from the Family of Dolly Parton

  1. Lucille's avatar Lucille says:
    August 25, 2026 at 3:27 pm

    Oh, my…I usually don’t cry at the deaths of the famous. But Dolly’s death has brought me to tears. R.I.P., dear Dolly!

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  2. Stella's avatar Stella says:
    August 25, 2026 at 3:59 pm

    Liked by 3 people

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  3. Stella's avatar Stella says:
    August 25, 2026 at 4:18 pm

    I will always love you!

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  4. Stella's avatar Stella says:
    August 25, 2026 at 4:44 pm

    Besides being a sweet person and a terrific entertainer, her legacy will live long after she is gone.

    Post on X:

    Anish Moonka
    @anishmoonka
    The doctor who delivered Dolly Parton in a one-room Tennessee cabin in 1946 was paid with a sack of cornmeal. Her father farmed other people’s land and could not read or write. Eighty years later, the reading program she built in his name has mailed more than 300 million books.

    She wrote “I Will Always Love You” on the same afternoon she wrote “Jolene,” as a goodbye to Porter Wagoner, and released it in 1974. Elvis wanted it. The night before the session, Colonel Tom Parker called and said Presley would only record it if they got half the publishing, meaning half of everything the song ever earned. She had been in Nashville ten years by then. She said no, and cried all night. Whitney Houston cut her version in 1992, held number one for fourteen weeks, and Forbes later put Parton’s royalties from it near $10 million. She put some of that money into an office complex in Nashville and called the place the house that Whitney built.

    Dollywood opened in Pigeon Forge in 1986 because she wanted paychecks in the county she came from. Around 4,000 people work there now. Three million visitors come every year. The University of Tennessee put its economic impact at $1.8 billion, and it is the largest employer in Sevier County. Since 2022 the company has paid tuition, fees, and books in full for every worker from their first day, seasonal hires included.

    Wildfires tore through those mountains in November 2016, killing fourteen people and destroying more than 2,400 buildings. Her foundation was handing out money within 48 hours. Every family that lost a home got $1,000 a month for six months, regardless of income. The final check was $5,000. Total delivered: $8.9 million.

    In April 2020 she sent $1 million to Vanderbilt for coronavirus research. When Moderna’s vaccine results ran in the New England Journal of Medicine that November, her fund appeared in the footnotes.

    Carl Dean, her husband of nearly sixty years, died in March 2025. The note she wrote to fans afterward ended with the same five words she wrote for Porter Wagoner back in 1974. She died in Nashville today. Her family asked that instead of flowers, people give to the Imagination Library, which still mails 3.4 million books a month to children who will never get to meet her.

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    • Stella's avatar Stella says:
      August 25, 2026 at 4:49 pm

      Part 2. Forbes puts Dolly Parton’s song catalog at around $120 million. She owned half of Dollywood. The biggest number attached to her name was money she never earned: $100 million handed to her in November 2022 to give away, on a ten-year clock. She died less than four years in.

      The terms were loose by design. Recipients pick whatever charities they want and get a decade to move the money. Two people had received the same award before her at the same amount. No public accounting of her distribution has been published, and her foundation’s filings do not break the award out as a line item.

      The Dollywood Foundation reported revenue of $55 million in 2022. By 2024 that had climbed to $89.8 million, against $84.1 million in expenses and $67.8 million in total assets. Its tax filings list about a dozen staff. She sat as chair of the board and drew nothing for it, a zero printed next to every other officer’s salary.

      She held publishing rights to her own songs going back to the 1960s, when Nashville writers routinely signed theirs away for a shot at getting recorded. That catalog now runs past 3,000 compositions and pays out whether or not anyone books a tour. She bought back the Locust Ridge farm her family had sold. She took a co-ownership stake in the theme park instead of licensing her name to it, and the same partnership built a 245-room hotel and a 20,000 square foot museum in downtown Nashville. Both open this fall, a few weeks after her death.

      The book program was never funded by her alone. Local partners cover roughly half the cost in most places, through community foundations, United Way chapters, and state matching money. The national foundation covers the rest. In one Indiana county the local endowment by itself passed $2 million. Her name was doing fundraising work in every one of those rooms.

      She and Carl Dean had no children. A catalog, a fifty percent stake in a theme park, and an unfinished hundred million dollar giving commitment now sit with other people. Running the foundation cost $84.1 million last year, and someone has to find that number again without her name on the ask.

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    • Stella's avatar Stella says:
      August 25, 2026 at 4:51 pm

      Part 3. A child who got a free book in the mail every month showed up to kindergarten reading like a child six months older. That finding, published last November in the Early Childhood Education Journal, came out of 747 students across four school districts.

      Colorado ran a bigger test. The state’s evaluation lab compared children who received the books against similar children in the same schools who did not, and found participants scored 0.125 standard deviations higher on DIBELS, the standard early-reading screen given at kindergarten entry. A standard deviation is roughly the spread of a typical class, so that gap looks modest on paper. The other number matters more. Participation cut the odds of a child scoring “well below benchmark,” the flag that triggers remedial reading support, by 16 to 24 percent.

      Thirty years of the program ran mostly on correlation. Families who sign up for free books tend to be families already inclined toward reading, which makes any simple comparison unfair, and most published work could show association and nothing stronger. The Colorado lab described its own work as one of the few studies offering compelling evidence of a causal effect. An earlier pair of matched studies from 2016 measured the effect on parent-child reading time at 0.043, small enough to round toward nothing.

      Roughly 27 percent of Colorado children under five now receive the books. The state has passed two million delivered. A study released this February pulled survey responses from more than 86,000 caregivers across five countries, weighing 18,112 enrolled families against 37,776 who were not. Parents reporting on their own kids is softer evidence than a test given at a school desk, and the strongest results still come from the school-desk studies.

      Missouri became the first state to fund the program for every child in 2024, and mailed 1.9 million books in 2025. This spring the state cut that budget line from about $6 million to roughly $2 million and froze new enrollment on July 1. The best evidence the program has ever produced arrived in the same twelve months its largest state backer walked away from most of the bill.

      The author write several more parts. Read them all if you like:

      https://x.com/anishmoonka/status/2092318244678013155?s=20

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  6. Lucille's avatar Lucille says:
    August 25, 2026 at 7:33 pm

    A tribute from a fan which takes a different path. When Dolly’s husband, Carl, died last year, Jordan of Daze of Jordan the Lion posted a tribute to him and Dolly. I think you all will enjoy it….

    DOLLY PARTON Dies At 80! Her Career, Carl, & BURIAL PLANS

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  7. Menagerie's avatar Menagerie says:
    August 25, 2026 at 7:56 pm

    People are starting to gather and leave flowers at the Dolly mural in my old hometown of Ringgold, where Dolly was married.

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  8. Lucille's avatar Lucille says:
    August 25, 2026 at 8:16 pm

    Another video I liked; this one from CBN….

    Dolly Parton Dies at 80 — Here’s What She Said About God

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  9. Stella's avatar Stella says:
    August 25, 2026 at 8:29 pm

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