Dolly Is for Everyone: How Dolly Parton’s Enduring Appeal Led to a Duke Writing Class

In the minutes, hours, and few days that have followed since Dolly Parton’s death was announced on Tuesday, Aug. 25, like many people, I began receiving messages from friends and family: “noooo Dolly,” “I’m so sad,” “I thought she’d live forever!” What’s different, though, is that I also began getting messages from students.

You see, these last five years, my first-year writing course at Duke University allowed first-year college students to explore Dolly Parton’s talent for music, her generous and open philanthropy, her complex relationship to feminism, and her ability to transcend musical genres and, perhaps more surprisingly today, political divides. The course, which I called “Dolly Parton for President?”, invited students to consider how a celebrity’s public persona could be constructed in a way that invites a feeling both of closeness (see also: Dolly Parton, the girl from a holler in Locust Ridge, Tenn.) and of veneration (see also: Saint Dolly, who can do no wrong).  

When I first began teaching the class, I had no idea if these students — born in the 2000s — would even know Dolly’s name. What I learned over these last five years is that some did, and some didn’t. Some were from the South, Appalachia, Tennessee; they grew up hearing Parton’s songs on family car trips and reading her Imagination Library books. Some knew Dolly through their parents. Some had heard of her, or knew of her rhinestone-encrusted persona, or recognized the song “9 to 5” from a social media trend. It didn’t matter how they started. By the end of each semester, as we looked at Parton the artist, the philanthropist and the businesswoman, looked at her desire to remain out of politics as one born from care for her diverse fans, her humor and fire and bravery, they all saw what so many fans have over the last 60 years: Dolly is for everyone. 

Parton is perhaps a surprising choice for college students to study: an old-school celebrity in a TikTok world. Parton did not narrate her life online; she never had a reality TV show where we saw her get her nails done or wig put on. She was exactly who she was and nothing more: girl singer for the Porter Wagoner Show who went her own way even when it was hard. Girl from Locust Ridge, rebelling against her parents’ and grandparents’ expectations about morality. Fashion icon who got inspiration for her look from what she affectionately called the “town tramp.” Woman who could handle — with a joke — the sexist, classist questions interviewers asked. Daughter who started the Imagination Library in honor of her father, who couldn’t read. By being her multifaceted self, she made it OK for us to be ourselves. It’s a simple message that is, in our society today, quite complex.  

Tressie McMillian Cottom, a sociologist and professor at that other blue school down the road, wrote a 2021 essay, “The Dolly Moment,” exploring what Parton’s enduring popularity says about what we look for in our heroes. As Cottom writes, Dolly’s “gift is one that is easy to overlook as mere folk.” She goes on to write, “Dolly’s creative genius is multifold and one of its top tiers is how deceptively easy her songwriting appears.” 

This deceptive simplicity is one of the reasons Parton is such a compelling topic for a writing seminar. Take “I Will Always Love You,” perhaps one of her best-known songs (certainly the one that made her the most money). There are only 20 lines in the song, and seven of them repeat the title. To write a song so simple and so deliciously complex is Parton’s true talent. There are only two people in the song; one is the speaker, and through the 20 lines an entire relationship unfolds. The separation is difficult (“bittersweet memories”) but without animosity (“I hope life treats you kind”), there’s movement (moving “each step of the way” away from the other person), and there’s the anticipated future when all of this is past (the simple future “I will always love you”). Relationships end, and time moves forward. And while Parton famously wrote this song when she was leaving The Porter Wagoner Show, it’s a song for anyone reckoning with a complex history and an imagined future, the reminder that life can be painful and harrowing and beautiful and joyful, all at the same time. 

In their messages, current and former students, friends and colleagues have almost all described gratitude for Dolly’s life and career. Students also reflected on the time they spent learning about and appreciating Dolly in our class. I am grateful to my students for going on the journey of Dolly with me, for seeing her as a talented, funny, imperfect, big-hearted, complicated human being — a person underneath the persona.  

More than the text of these messages is the subtext, what is underneath the words when we reach out to someone who shares a connection with us. “I see you,” these messages say. “And you see me.”  

I believe this is how Parton greeted the world — as a complicated but mostly good place, filled with complicated but mostly good people. In 2026 America, this view feels radical.  

As for me, I am grateful that all of us complicated but mostly good people got to share the Earth with Dolly Parton and with each other. That is, and I think Dolly would agree, nothing less than a miracle. 

Leslie Maxwell is a Lecturing Fellow in Duke University’s Writing and Rhetoric Program. She has taught the course “Dolly Parton for President?” ten times from fall 2021 to spring 2026.