Goodbye to Dolly Parton and All the Divas Who Raised Me

When you have a father from Texas, you're going to know something about country music.

Because he's going to watch Hee Haw and tell you about Buck Owens. He's going to watch The Grand Ole Opry and tell you about Hank Williams. And you're going to learn about Dolly Parton—a national treasure who believed in children's literacy and that Black lives mattered. She was a woman who championed our agency and empowerment as women, and was a charitable hustler, both beautiful and smart.

Over the years, I learned Parton was among the few famous white Southerners who were beacons of hope and light across the race and class divide—former U.S. President and peanut farmer from Georgia, Jimmy Carter; former Texas Gov. Ann Richards; and Tennessee-born Parton, a musical icon and songwriting genius.

Parton died on Tuesday after a short bout with cancer. She was 80 years old, and judging from the outpouring online and elsewhere, universally beloved by so many Black people.

We love an unproblematic country music queen.

When I was an entertainment reporter in Bakersfield, Calif. I sometimes covered country music and its stars. I broke the story nationally for The Bakersfield Californian when Garth Brooks proposed to his wife Trisha Yearwood at a celebration at Buck Owen's Crystal Palace. Yet, despite having a father who loved country music and its stars, I'd had zero interest in my 20s for what I saw as "cow music." It wasn't until I lived and worked in Bakersfield that I gained an appreciation for both the iconic Bakersfield sound of Owens, Merle Haggard, and others, and that of "classic" country, which included the likes of Loretta Lynn and Parton.

I fell in love with her voice, but what I really loved and respected about Parton was how she suffered no fools. Just because she chose a fun "bimbo" aesthetic didn't mean she didn't have a brain, and she was never afraid to be fully herself in every facet of her life.

In fact, all the great divas do this.

They know their worth. They know themselves. And that authenticity shines through the rolls of boob tape, seven layers of makeup, and hair so high it could touch God.

Parton is one of my favorite divas, alongside Stevie Nicks, Tina Turner, Whitney Houston, Patti LaBelle, Aretha Franklin, Annie Lennox, and so many more. But I didn't come to appreciate Parton until I was an adult.

As a child, I was much more fixated on divas who looked like me because they were often so rare.

The Divas Who Raised Me

"That's me! That's me!" I shouted.

I was watching BET's Video Soul one evening with my mother and sisters. The "me" I was pointing to was Sheila E., performing "The Glamorous Life" in her 1984 music video. She was so beautiful and powerful that I instantly wanted to be her. I wanted to be the girl on TV, but it was so rare that the girl on TV had skin like mine.

Back then, seeing a beautiful Black woman or girl on TV or in an advertisement was such a rare treat. MTV still didn't play Black music back then. All the biggest "icons" who made the news and magazine covers were white. Because of this, nearly every prominent sighting of a Black young woman or girl from the 1980s and early 90s is burned into my brain—from the little girls on the Just For Me perm box to Pebbles offering men a ride in her Mercedes.

I was watching and taking notes, as all little Black girls do.

My sisters and I would pull "that's me" all the time while watching TV when we were little. Other Black girls who were "me" included a young Whitney Houston in "I Wanna Dance With Somebody;" child stars/singers Tracie Spencer, Shanice, and Janet Jackson; former Miss America and "The Right Stuff" singer, Vanessa Williams; a gaggle of Cosby kids, but specifically Keisha Knight-Pulliam in the made-for-TV musical Pollyanna, and Jasmine Guy as the terminally bougie Whitley Gilbert on "A Diff'rent World."

As I grew older, I started to discover other women I became obsessed with—multi-talented performers like Grace Jones, Eartha Kitt, Pearl Bailey, and Lena Horne; writer Toni Morrison; actresses Dorothy Dandridge and Diahann Carroll; and so many others. Because I loved the look. I loved the glamour. I loved the wit.

I loved a "diva."

Because I wanted to be one.

My mom and grandmother were icons to me—in how they talked and dressed, in their charm and how they wielded it. Seeing that represented in diverse, positive images is important for a young person's development. But considering how young women and girls are often bombarded with unhealthy and problematic images, telling them what they "should" or "shouldn't" look like, having icons who look like you matters. I grew up hating my body and how it developed because I wanted to be waif-thin like the girls in fashion magazines. I wanted to be able to double-cross my legs like the white and Asian girls did in my school. I wanted to be a size zero. I wanted to be something I could never be because I was considered "fat" or "husky" by 1990s standards.

But my divas defied the beauty standard and set their own. They told me there were many ways you could be. And my value wasn't just about looks—it was about talent and charm, grace and skill. Whether I was in a full beat of makeup, or bare-faced and unencumbered, I could be "me."

And I could be loved.

Goodbye, Divas

Parton, who grew up poor in a family of 12 children, often gave with her whole heart in ways both big and small. As much money as she made as a star, she gave plenty of it away to individuals and institutions, to children and those in need, from COVID sufferers to AIDS victims.

Most of it was done without fanfare, like in 2021, when she helped a Black neighborhood in Nashville by investing royalties from Whitney Houston's cover of "I Will Always Love You" into an office park there.

From The Guardian:

“It was mostly just Black families and people that lived around there,” Parton said. “It was a whole strip mall. And I thought, ‘This is the perfect place for me to be, considering it was Whitney … I’m going to be down here with her people, who are my people as well.’”

While a lot of emphasis is often made on the superficial in our media, Parton was proof you could be beautiful from within and without, which, to me, is the mark of a true diva. It's in her spirit. Not in all the negative connotations of "diva-ness," of being dramatic or mean, but of being an inspiration to others. Of being legendary. Of being an icon.

As Gen X and Millennials get older, we will continue to say goodbye to icons we've watched our entire lives. Icons who are irreplaceable because the machine that made them no longer exists. Hollywood is a mess, and greed has destroyed the entertainment industry, as celebrities take to social media and appear everywhere from T-Mobile ads to the latest Marvel flick, losing all mystery.

It's hard to be an icon if you're on a less-than-3x5-inch screen, competing with everyone from the current occupant in the White House to The Real Housewives for a viewer's dwindling attention span.

(I'm also pretty sure they broke the diva mold after they made Beyoncé, because almost no one even tries to be a triple threat performer these days.)

With the loss of each diva, we lose a bit of the world that was once before. I have friends who still aren't over losing Whitney, and who still mourn Betty White. Who are still at a loss for words over Aretha, Eartha, Lena. These are women from an era when we still had a monoculture where a song, person, or moment could dominate an entire national discourse or news cycle, sometimes for weeks.

But to paraphrase another diva, Sunset Boulevard's Norma Desmond, this change is not the fault of our icons:

"The divas are still big; it's our screens that got small."