Dolly Parton died on 25 August in Tennessee, the state that raised her, aged 80. The tributes that followed celebrated her incredible life in all the ways most of us are familiar with: her high-pitched vibrato, the signature peroxide-blonde architecture that was her hair, six decades of songwriting that NPR once called its “own version of the American songbook”. But there’s another story, a lesser known but arguably just as impactful legacy that Dolly’s own father called her greatest contribution: a book programme called the Imagination Library, which put more than 330 million titles into children’s hands.
Dolly’s music rarely matched the rhinestone-and-wig persona that created it. Behind the country-pop gloss were records that took on subjects about a stillborn birth (Down From Dover), suicide (The Bridge), shame (Just Because I'm A Woman) and abuse (A Gamble Either Way). Subjects that most Nashville songwriters of her generation left alone. The same instinct that drove her to say the hard thing but wrap it in something warm and accessible also defined the second half of her life. She died with an estimated net worth of $450m, publishing rights she never sold and a beauty, apparel and kitchenware empire anchored by Dollywood. Her lifetime giving is estimated to be as high as $500m, a figure large enough that some estimate she could have been a billionaire had she not given so much of it away.
The gifts moved in every direction: $1m to Vanderbilt University Medical Center research that helped develop Moderna's Covid-19 vaccine, $1,000 a month for six months to families who lost their homes in the 2016 Sevier County wildfires (which would come to total $12.5m), $1m to the Salvation Army in December 2023 which funded about 2.5 million meals. She received the Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy in 2022 and told the Associated Press she didn’t really have a strategy: “I just give from my heart. I never know what I'm going to do or why I'm gonna do it.”
But for all Dolly Parton’s achievements, including international chart success, an armful of Grammys and major acting accolades, her dad once told her that one contribution stood out among the rest: the launch of her Imagination Library.
Dolly says she read about 50 books a year. She believed that “if you can read, it gives you wings to fly anywhere you want to go”. She grew up in extreme poverty in rural Tennessee, the fourth of 12 children in a one room cabin with no electricity and no books besides the Bible. Her beloved sharecropper father never learned to read or write, which he was deeply ashamed of. “Daddy was a very smart man, but he was ashamed that he couldn't read or write,” Parton told Oprah Winfrey in 2020. “That bothered him. He felt like he couldn't learn after he was grown. I remember thinking, I need to do something.”
That was the entire premise of Dolly Parton's Imagination Library, which launched in 1995 through the Dollywood Foundation. The programme mails a free, personalised book monthly to any registered child from birth until age five, and today operates across the US, Canada, the UK, Australia and Ireland. Independent evaluations, including studies by the University of Alaska Anchorage and Michigan State University, found that children enrolled in the programme were more enthusiastic about reading and better prepared for school, a finding that lands harder set against a national decline in American reading proficiency, with Data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) showing that fourth-grade reading proficiency has dropped across three consecutive national assessment cycles.
Every child enrolled receives the same first book: a customised edition of The Little Engine That Could. Dolly credits the story to her own mum, who used to tell it to her whenever something felt out of reach. “On many occasions, when my dream seemed far away, my Mama would tell me the story of the Little Engine to comfort and encourage me.”
For younger generations, the first they might know of Dolly is as the lady who sends them books. “The older I get, the more appreciative I seem to be of the ‘book lady’ title,” Dolly said in a 2013 interview. “It makes me feel more like a legitimate person, not just a singer or an entertainer. But it makes me feel like I've done something good with my life and with my success.”
Every living US president has publicly mourned Dolly, with former president Barack Obama emphasising that the late icon “helped millions of kids learn to read”. As news of her death travelled, social media tributes noting the Imagination Library’s impact began pouring out. One X user wrote that as a teen mum in college, she didn’t have much extra money, “but once a month, every month until she was five, my daughter received a book from Dolly’s Imagination Library.” Another posted that one of their earliest childhood memories in Nashville was watching Egyptian mums from immigrant families talk to each other in Arabic about how to sign up for the reading programme.
The Backwoods Barbie had many “Dollyisms”, but there’s one that best sums up her approach to sharing the joy of reading: “If you’re lucky enough to have more than you need, then you’re lucky enough to give.”
