January 19, 1946 – August 25, 2026

Every episode of this podcast ends the same way. I ask the guest what they're most curious about right now. Around a hundred and fifty people have answered it and no two answers have been alike.

Dolly Parton died two weeks ago at 80, and I've read countless tributes since. There’s not a lot that this indie podcaster can say that would add much to the Dolly Parton narrative. She stood alone in her songwriting proficiency and was a role model for generations. Surely, her legacy will live on for centuries.

But every one of the tributes I’ve read was about what she gave us. The songs, the books, the park, the money, the wigs. All of it true and all of it well covered.

She built an empire by not trying to, all she wanted was to find something out first. That's the part nobody writes about. What was she most curious about?

My own first Dolly memory is Johnny Carson, a grown man in a good suit coming apart on national television while a kid in Missouri (me) watched. He made the joke about what he'd pay for a peek. The audience roared. Dolly laughed the loudest, because she always did. Nobody on that stage ever asked her what she was reading, or writing, or trying to figure out.

She had answers. Decades of them. Curiosity was the engine of everything she built, from the songs nobody would play to the vaccine money at 74. It kept turning up in my own interviews too, with artists who never met her.

She grew up one of twelve kids in a one-room cabin on Locust Ridge, Tennessee. Her mother, Avie Lee, sang the old ballads that came over from Scotland and Wales, murder songs and drowning songs and songs about girls who got ruined. Dolly was writing her own by five and playing a homemade guitar by seven.

What she took from those ballads wasn't the melody. It was permission to go looking in the places country radio had roped off.

Down from Dover, released in 1970, is sung by a pregnant teenager whose parents threw her out and whose man is never coming back. The baby is stillborn in the last verse. Stations refused to play it. She wrote it anyway, and she kept writing that kind of song for fifty more years, the ones she called her sad-ass songs, about shame and pregnancy and being cast out, at a time when the industry wanted her sweet.

Her father, Robert Lee Parton, never learned to read or write. Dolly always said he was one of the smartest men she knew, and she believed his life came out smaller than it should have because of it.

She could have funded a school. She could have put her name on a library wing. Instead she got interested in a narrower question: what does it take for a five-year-old to believe a book belongs to them?

The Imagination Library, which she started in 1995, mails a free age-appropriate book to a registered child every month from birth until kindergarten. There’s no income test. There’s not a form proving you need it. That was deliberate, because she didn't want any kid to feel like a charity case for reading.

In interviews she talked about the envelope more than the books. A book shows up at the house with the child's own name printed on it. That kid has mail. That kid is somebody worth mailing to.

As of the week of her passing, 332 million books were sent.

In April 2020, when nobody knew anything yet, she gave a million dollars to Vanderbilt University Medical Center and started the Dolly Parton COVID-19 Research Fund. Some of that money went into early-stage work behind the Moderna vaccine. Her name turned up in the acknowledgments of the published research, which she thought was hilarious and wonderful.

She wasn't writing checks from a distance. She had a friend at Vanderbilt, the surgeon Dr. Naji Abumrad, and she kept asking him questions. What's the hold-up. What would it take. Who's working on it. Then she funded the answers, and kept going after the pandemic: pediatric infectious disease, children's cancer, children's hospitals.

Seventy-four years old, no science background, and she wanted to know how the thing worked.

When the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame nominated her in 2022 she tried to decline. She said she hadn't earned it. The Hall told her she had and inducted her anyway.

So she went and made the record. Rockstar came out in 2023, thirty tracks, with Paul McCartney and Stevie Nicks and Rob Halford and a few dozen other people who grew up on her. She was 77 and learning to sing over a wall of guitars.

This is how she explained lasting that long:

Read that again if you make anything for a living. She knew exactly where her competence ended, and she stayed curious about the ground just past it.

LA-based singer-songwriter Claire Holley wrote a song called Beauty School after reading a magazine piece about Dolly and Tammy Wynette. Two women who came up through the same brutal system, who could have been set against each other and mostly were, and who became close instead.

Tammy kept her beautician's license current her whole life. Dolly always said if she hadn't sung for a living she'd have done hair. And when Tammy was dying, Dolly came to the hospital, did her makeup, and fixed her hair.

Claire read one article, got curious about one detail, and wrote a song out of it.

When I brought that song up with Mississippi-born Shelly Fairchild, she told me she's obsessed with Dolly. Signed photo on her wall. Signed lyric sheet for Hard Candy Christmas. Then she told me the Dolly and Tammy story had redirected an actual piece of her own life:

A woman in Mississippi went and got licensed to cut hair because of what two women in Nashville did for each other.

The songs and the books and the park are what her curiosity built. That license is what it started in somebody else.

Eighty years of things she wanted to know.

Old ballads. Unwed mothers. An illiterate father. What a book does to a five-year-old. How a vaccine gets made. Whether a 77-year-old can pull off a rock album. What her friend needed on the last hard day.

I never got to ask her my question. I'd like to think she'd have had an answer ready, and that it would have been about something she hadn't tried yet. But thank you, Dolly, for leaving a legacy of joy, love, and curiosity, behind.

The 2026 State of Music in the Age of AI & Streaming Report is out. Get your free summary here.

Thank you for reading and for supporting the podcast. Remember, don't just be a goldfish…be a curious one. — Jason English, Host.