Happy Birthday, Dolly Parton!

In case you didn’t know, today is an extremely important national holiday. Yes, it’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and of course we stan, but I’m not talking about that one. I’m talking about the fact that today is DOLLY REBECCA PARTON’S 80TH BIRTHDAY! 

Loving Dolly Parton is a huge part of my personality, as anyone who has ever spoken to me surely knows, so I couldn’t let this day pass without paying tribute to the person I love more than anyone else in the entire world (excepting people I know in real life, of course, but TBH there’s a few who rank below Dolly). 

My love for her began in childhood, where I was raised by people who banned MTV but allowed me to listen to all the country music I wanted and watch CMT deep into the night. This is the same principle that meant I wasn’t allowed to have video games but could read essentially any book, which is why I read The Shining in, like, seventh grade.

One of my most prized possessions during this period was a hot pink Barbie boom box that played cassette tapes. My small collection included the Beauty and the Beast soundtrack, the Little Mermaid soundtrack, and a cassingle of Dolly Parton’s “Romeo,” featuring Billy Ray Cyrus, Tanya Tucker, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Kathy Mattea, and Pam Tillis. 

If you haven’t heard this song, remedy that immediately, but also read these sample lyrics: “And that sexy little body beats all I've ever seen / I ain't never seen a cowboy look that good in jeans / My temperature keeps risin' every time we meet / I may not be in love, but let me tell you, I'm in heat.” 

Years later my mother told me she knew “Romeo” was a little bit risqué for a 6-year-old, but she couldn’t bear to take the tape away because I loved it so much. (What neither of us remembers is where this tape even came from, since, as mentioned, my catalog at this time was mostly limited to Disney animated classics.) 

Anyway, I was hooked. As I’ve said here before, my obsession reached such a height that during a rare snowstorm in Virginia Beach, I asked my grandpa to help me make a Dolly Parton snowman. Snowwoman? We don’t need to get into the gender politics of snow creatures, but you know he obliged without question. Only granddaughter privilege in action!

Most of my celebrity obsessions have waned over the years, but my passion for Dolly just keeps getting stronger. Just last week, I was losing my mind over the fact that she’s donating the proceeds from her new version of “Light of a Clear Blue Morning” to children’s cancer research. How much money do new singles make in 2026? Probably not much, but I still appreciate that she just does stuff like this all the time. 

Take, for example, her very famous $1 million donation to coronavirus vaccine research, or her even more famous Imagination Library, which has donated millions — truly so many millions — of books to kids around the world. (At Dollywood, in one of the several museums dedicated to Dolly’s life, there’s a room about the Library that has a wall counter of how many books the organization has gifted. When I was there last October, the number was 301,078,561. Yes, I teared up.)   

This is why I simply do not care that Dolly doesn’t talk about politics or say anything about who she votes for and probably never will. I know she does this so as not to alienate her conservative fans, of which there are many, and when any other celebrity does the same, I say they’re cowardly and greedy. 

But with her, it just doesn’t matter. So what if she’s making more money by not pissing off her MAGA listeners? She grabs their cash with her little mesh-gloved hands and gives it right back to kids in need and scientists trying to find a vaccine for the deadliest pandemic in American history, and I bet that pisses them off just fine! 

Could a woman like that really vote for T****? It’s possible, but I doubt it. If anything, she probably just doesn’t vote at all, which still doesn’t bother me because she’s out here giving her money away like she stole it. As I was discussing with a friend the other day, Dolly should probably be a billionaire by now, but she isn’t because she doesn’t keep all her cash to herself! AND THAT’S THE WAY IT FUCKIN’ SHOULD BE!  

It’s also never been nothing that she so willingly embraces her LGBTQ fans in an industry that has always been at best resistant to change and at worst downright exclusionary and bigoted. Could she do more? Of course, but who among us couldn’t? If what she does do is good enough for the very talented drag queens I saw at Dollypalooza last week, then it’s good enough for me! 

It might sound like I’m excusing some stuff in Dolly that I don’t in other people, and yeah, I probably am. But she’s 80 years old and wrote “Jolene” and “I Will Always Love You” on the same day! Let her live! 

The last thing I’ll share about Dolly Parton is this incredibly fun fact I learned last year while reading her 1994 autobiography, Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business. Apparently, “Two Doors Down” is about a time she was out at Howard Johnson’s with a bunch of friends who were eating fried clams, but she couldn’t have any because she was on a diet. She felt “completely left out” and went home and wrote “Two Doors Down,” which, as a reminder, starts with her crying her heart out that she’s not invited to the party — the party here actually being a metaphor for eating fried clams. If that doesn’t make you fall in love, I simply don’t know what will. 

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, YOU BEAUTIFUL CLAM-LOVING QUEEN! May you live for another 80 years and give away another 300 million books.