4 Ways Dolly Parton’s Influence Reached Beyond Music

As the origin story goes, Parton was born in a one-room cabin in the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee. Her home didn’t have running water or electricity. The household didn’t even have a television set until Parton purchased one herself so the family could watch her first TV appearance in 1956. 

For many Americans, Dolly Parton is a symbol of the Appalachian region. In her decades of interviews and media appearances, Parton pushed back on stereotypes and derogatory jokes. She quipped that her “country class” came from her rural beginnings. 

In 1986, she bought the Silver Dollar City theme park in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. Dolly spiffed up the attraction and rebranded it as “Dollywood,” turning it into a Parton-themed amusement park that hosts millions of visitors a year. 

But creating Dollywood was about more than just expanding her brand or diversifying her investments, says Lydia Hamessley, professor of music at Hamilton College and author of Unlikely Angel: The Songs of Dolly Parton. She saw the park as a chance to revitalize the area she loved. In opening Dollywood, she created job opportunities and a steady tourist stream for years to come.

Parton has an enormous LGBTQ+ fanbase, one she said made her “proud.” She embraced the drag community and even admitted to losing a Dolly Parton lookalike contest to a queen that nailed her impersonation a little too well.

Parton’s commitment to queer inclusivity went back decades. Early on in her career, she spoke about the importance of, as she put it, leaving the judgment to God. “She has given us that message in so many songs in so many ways over the years,” Melnick says.

Parton’s 1991 song “Family” painted a picture of an inclusive worldview with the lyrics: “Some are preachers / some are gay / some are addicts, drunks and strays / But not one is turned away when it’s family.”

Years before the Supreme Court made marriage equality legal in all 50 states, Parton spoke out in support. When a lesbian visitor to a Dollywood park was forced to turn her pro-marriage equality shirt inside out, Parton responded immediately, declaring that “everyone knows of my personal support of the gay and lesbian community. Dollywood is a family park, and all families are welcome.” 

In 2005, she contributed an Oscar-nominated original song to the soundtrack for Transamerica (2005), about a transgender woman who learns she has a son. In the following years, Parton continued to speak about her support for the transgender community.

Dolly Parton famously stayed out of the political fray, even when explicitly pressed to share her views. Some of her fans referred to this nonpartisan stance as Parton’s “Dollitics.” But Parton’s songs and advocacy work reveal a deep commitment to human rights, specifically when it came to championing women. 

Parton became a model—and mentor—for women in entertainment. In her 1968 song “Just Because I’m a Woman,” Parton confronted the double standard that judged women more harshly than men for their sexual histories. Two years later, in “Down from Dover,” Parton sang a heartbreaking story of an unwed pregnant woman ostracized by her community. In her 1980s hit “9 to 5,” she wrote of women’s struggles to get ahead in the workforce. She also wielded influence behind the scenes in the entertainment industry. In 1986, she co-founded the film and television production company Sandollar Productions, which produced projects like the 1992 film Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Many of Parton’s songs that explored womanhood hit airwaves in the midst of the second wave feminist movement—but for years, Parton shied away from the label “feminist.” Then, in 2020, she gave an interview on a red carpet: “I suppose I am a feminist if I believe that women should be able to do anything they want to,” she said.

The years of Parton’s charitable giving and philanthropic work rival that of her songwriting and performing. “She always said ‘When I see a need, I fill it,’” Melnick says.

Those needs included disaster relief, educational assistance, medical innovation investments and more. People will likely remember her $1 million gift that funded research involved in the development of Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine; some fans jokingly referred to it as the “Dolly vaccine.” In 2026, to honor her multimillion dollar investments in pediatric cancer research and other medical breakthroughs, the East Tennessee Children’s Hospital changed its name to the Dolly Parton Children’s Hospital. 

So much of Parton’s philanthropy has focused on her home state of Tennessee. Since starting the Dollywood Foundation in 1988, she funded initiatives to decrease the school drop-out rate in her home county. The Imagination Library, her groundbreaking nonprofit program, began delivering free books to children in Tennessee and has since expanded to send more than 300 million books all over the world. And when wildfires devastated the Great Smoky Mountains region in 2016, Parton established the “My People Fund,” donating $1,000 a month to families as they rebuilt their lives.  

Her philanthropy came “out of that same place of rootedness in real people’s lives and stories,” Hamessley says. In 2022, Parton received the prestigious Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy in recognition of her contributions.