Now, I get it. Defending Dolly Parton is like defending puppies, libraries or the concept of love songs. It’s an unmissable penalty, no one is going to argue with you. But in a climate filled with celebrities who only went to an island full of child-trafficking billionaires “for business purposes”, I feel justified in pinning my hopes on a 5 foot blonde woman who has no idea who I am. 

I could talk about her incredible philanthropic ventures, like the Imagination Library or helping fund a Covid vaccine, or even how she is my style muse, but that wouldn’t truly encapsulate how I feel about her. 

On a family holiday to the USA in 2022, Dolly Parton waved at me from a horse-drawn carriage on a random day at Dollywood theme park and since then, I see life differently. Now, in year 4 A.D. (after Dolly), I feel finally ready to put into words what changed. 

Lately, it feels like the power of celebrity is diminishing. Open any newspaper, social media app or hover awkwardly with your Tesco Meal Deal in the staff room at work and someone is mad at someone’s reaction to the current depressing news cycle. 

Ten years ago, maybe even pre-Covid, this news cycle would’ve been a bigger bombshell, but it almost feels as though it’s fallen on deaf ears. The president of the USA has broken 14 laws by lunchtime and a British Prince has been dragged kicking and screaming through the courts and people seem to just… get on with it, I guess. Life carries on, even if you’re living in the opening news montage of an apocalypse film, you’ve still got to use up the eggs in the fridge that are on the verge of going off. 

What has any of this got to do with 11-time Grammy Award winner Dolly Parton?  Well, everything.

Dolly practices a political philosophy I have named ‘Dolitics’ which is radical compassion wrapped in rhinestones. The way she goes through life has meant that she’s loved by Red-hat sporting MAGA defenders, as well as equally being the frontline of the charge for women’s rights, she literally wrote the anthem for God’s sake. And while we’re on the subject of God, she seems to be the only Christian who remembers what ‘Christian values’ even mean, which in a world of watered-down mega-church Apostolic turned alcoholic scam artists, is refreshing. She ‘walks the line’ as her fellow country star Johnny Cash would say with the most grace and precision in a way that no one else has ever done, and she does it in the most amazing heels you’ve ever seen.

“I was the first woman to burn my bra - it took the fire department four days to put it out,” encapsulates this perfectly, she’s telling you she is a feminist with a nod and a wink to those who aren’t ready to accept that fact yet. 

It feels like America pinned all of its hopes on the wrong 80-year-old. Could you imagine the utopia Americans would live in if Dolly was president? Children would be clothed, fed and educated and the world would be like that meme with the dolphins. 

But, enough about global collapse, back to me.

I have a complicated relationship with my grandparents, but there was one invisible string that ran through the generations for me, my mum and my grandad, and that was country music. 

My maternal Grandad was a complex man, but his greatest passion was country music (and busses, but that’s irrelevant to this story). He seemed like he’d wandered out of a Glen Campbell song, got lost and ended up in Aldershot. He had a seriously impressive collection of CDs and vinyl and my mum would borrow them to play them in the car, and after a while of tune after tune, a love of country music was born in the backseat, and I would find myself singing along to anything from Loretta Lynn to Kacey Musgraves. Aged 13, I begged for a pair of cowboy boots for my birthday which I would wear to the Peacocks shopping centre in Woking, way before it was cool and I got involved in the local country music scene, which was about six people in a HMV before it exploded into what it is now.

When my Grandad was dying in the hospice at the end of his life and the cancer he had tried to outrun quietly for so long made it to his brain, he couldn’t remember any of us anymore.  A nurse suggested that we bring some of his albums to play him, and when the tinny country ballads rang through the hastily sourced Walkman headphones, I caught a flash of the cowboy we once knew in his eyes once more. Tears streamed down his cheeks as he experienced the most clarity he had in months. We lost him just before I turned 18.

That brings us to three years later when I saw Dolly Parton and she waved at me, I felt the strangest cocktail of emotions I’d ever felt. I felt on top of the world, like one day even the birth of my first child wouldn’t trump when she looked in my eyes and waved at me. But I also felt an incredible sadness because he should have been there too.

You’d be right to call me naive for putting all my faith in an octogenarian celebrity, because we keep getting burned, but damn it, I don’t care. There isn’t a whole lot of good in the world, but a lot of my good times were thanks to her and her fellow country singing friends. So, this is the rhinestoned hill I choose to die on, and even if it all blows up in my face, my heart was in the right place. Right, left - who cares? I choose to practice Dolitics, and that’s good enough for me.