Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee received a $1m check from country music legend Dolly Parton in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic. It was one of many she’d given the center, but this time Dolly wanted her donation used to seek a cure for Covid 19. Vanderbilt hasn’t found a cure, unfortunately, but their research did help develop the Moderna vaccine earlier than expected. By early 2022, the jab had been given to more than 250m people and saved countless lives.Dolly played down the importance of her donation in a BBC interview. Many other people, she said, probably donated too. Even so, she added: “I’m a very proud girl today to know I had anything at all to do with something that’s going to help us through this crazy pandemic.”It was a typically humble answer from a woman who would be forgiven for boasting from time to time. Dolly Parton is the most successful female country singer of all time. Her songs have been on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart for seven decades and she’s had more No. 1 hits than any other female artist in history. Dolly has also written more than 3,000 songs and won a staggering 10 Grammy Awards.Her influence transcends country music. In 2021, she made Time magazine’s list of 100 Most Influential People under the heading ‘Icon’.“Have you ever met anyone who doesn’t love Dolly Parton?” wrote country star Miley Cyrus, her goddaughter.
Growing up in the Smoky Mountains
Dolly Rebecca Parton was born in 1946, the fourth of 12 children growing up in a one-room wooden cabin without heat or running water in Tennessee’s Great Smoky Mountains. Her father, Robert Lee Parton, was an illiterate sharecropper. Her mother, Avie Lee, was a homemaker. Dolly spent her early childhood battling extreme poverty with the family living hand-to-mouth as subsistence farmers.
Dolly’s mother told her “you are only poor if you choose to be”, however, a line she used in her autobiographical Coat of Many Colors, one of a brace of songs about her childhood.
