Dolly Parton, the songwriter and singer from Locust Ridge, Tennessee, died Tuesday, Aug. 25. Her death sparked a tsunami of support and reflection from the media, her family and friends, colleagues, and her fans.
When someone lives a life as loudly and publicly as Parton did for 80 years, it's of little surprise that that person will be written about for days, weeks, and years to come after their death. But one article about Parton from The Washington Post is getting a lot of attention — and it's because its author missed a crucial detail of the singer's life.
"Dolly Parton's lack of children demonstrated that the world could in fact love a woman who wasn't a mother," the Post wrote on X — a statement that's already fairly outrageous. The message continued, "But more importantly, she was proof that a person could be an advocate for children while personally choosing against parenting."
In her column, Ashley Fetters Maloy wrote that she loves Parton "for the same reasons everyone loves Dolly Parton." For Maloy, that list includes that her "songs are undeniably powerful, her joy infectious, her hair magnificent" and her "quietly subversive jokes about her ***** and her fashion sense will never not be funny, or poignant."
(I feel compelled to note here that people loved Parton for many, many more reasons — for example, those of us who also grew up in small Southern towns and who have been on the receiving end of a whole lot of judgement for that have often been buoyed by Parton's take-no-prisoners approach to being true to who she was, where she was from, and what that meant culturally over the decades.)
#post #death #person
When someone lives a life as loudly and publicly as Parton did for 80 years, it's of little surprise that that person will be written about for days, weeks, and years to come after their death. But one article about Parton from The Washington Post is getting a lot of attention — and it's because its author missed a crucial detail of the singer's life.
"Dolly Parton's lack of children demonstrated that the world could in fact love a woman who wasn't a mother," the Post wrote on X — a statement that's already fairly outrageous. The message continued, "But more importantly, she was proof that a person could be an advocate for children while personally choosing against parenting."
In her column, Ashley Fetters Maloy wrote that she loves Parton "for the same reasons everyone loves Dolly Parton." For Maloy, that list includes that her "songs are undeniably powerful, her joy infectious, her hair magnificent" and her "quietly subversive jokes about her ***** and her fashion sense will never not be funny, or poignant."
(I feel compelled to note here that people loved Parton for many, many more reasons — for example, those of us who also grew up in small Southern towns and who have been on the receiving end of a whole lot of judgement for that have often been buoyed by Parton's take-no-prisoners approach to being true to who she was, where she was from, and what that meant culturally over the decades.)
#post #death #person
23 hours ago
