When music icon Dolly Parton died on Tuesday after a brief cancer battle, Nashville was quickly washed in a sea of hot pink and rhinestones, with buildings switching their lights to her iconic hue and residents breaking out their best Dolly-inspired outfits.
Fans placed flowers outside of her Nashville residence and congregated around murals of the singer throughout the city. Honky-tonks on Broadway blasted her music, and fans turned their front lawns into makeshift memorials honoring the singer’s impact.
Even netizens paused their bickering to honor Parton, who helped break barriers for female Country singers with her poignant songwriting, sharp business acumen and unique aesthetic, which she said was modeled after “the town tramp” from her childhood. Parton was the top-ranked female Country singer from 1967 to 1993, earning 25 No. 1 singles and entry into the Country Music and Rock & Roll Halls of Fame.
However, more than the music and the aesthetic, five Tennessee real estate agents — Mia Carlson, Emilee Warner, Claudia Stallings, Sara Lederach and Crystal Morgan — told Inman they hope people take inspiration from Parton’s rare authenticity and generosity.
“She worked 80 years, well, 80 and a half years, to try to leave the world a more beautiful, colorful, sparkly place than she found it, with her raggedy coat made by her mama,” Warner said. “We’re brought together in this community because we all feel like we lost an aunt or a family member. She’s who we grew up with. She’s who we look up to.”
Turning judgment into acceptance
Mia Carlson
Long before making the journey from Miami to New York City to Nashville, Mia Carlson loved Dolly Parton.
Carlson said she connected with Parton’s songwriting — warm, vulnerable and powerful — and her refusal to be boxed into one lane, with the star playing a key role in bridging the gap between Country and Pop music.
However, what she respected most about Parton was her ability to turn criticism about her aesthetic into a mirror, exposing the insidious nature of respectability politics and expectations of traditional femininity.
“It was interesting how she faced condescension — how, when people treated her poorly or spoke to her in a way that was disrespectful, she didn’t give into it. She would disarm them immediately with charm,” she said. “There’s so much power in that. She was unapologetic about how she presented herself; she was so intelligent and life-changing. She channeled all of her creative energy into other things, like making people feel seen.”
Carlson said one of the groups Parton made feel seen was the queer community. The singer was a staunch ally, often collaborating with queer recording artists, using her production company to support queer filmmakers and storytellers, and even funding gender-affirming surgeries for transgender people.
Parton also had a strict anti-discrimination policy at her Dollywood theme park, with the singer banning a group of Ku Klux Klan members and anti-LGBTQ+ protestors from entering the park during an independently organized “Gay Day” event for thousands of queer fans.
When Parton’s peers questioned whether she could be a Christian and an ally at the same time, she simply said, “To me, people are people … Many of my friends are gay, male and female. I don’t judge people. I don’t care what people do in their bedrooms, and people shouldn’t care what I do in mine.”
A queer woman herself, Carlson said it was powerful to see Parton live — and give — authentically.
“She was a true ally. She wasn’t a perfect person, and no one is, but she listened and put her money where her mouth was,” she said. “So that’s where I take a lot of inspiration. I give $300 from every transaction to an immigrants’ rights organization of my clients’ choosing. That’s such a small amount, but she proved it’s important to make a difference wherever you can. And as you grow, grow your impact, too.”
Keeping the door open
Emilee Warner has always felt connected to Dolly Parton, with the two sharing a birthdate and both growing up in East Tennessee.
“She is just part of the air we breathe,” she said.
Emilee Warner
Warner never got the opportunity to meet Parton in person, however. The closest she got to the star was leading Cracker Barrel Old Country Store’s music program, which released Parton’s 2020 A Holly Dolly Christmas album.
She said Parton was an incredible businessperson and collaborator and often used her influence to support up-and-coming songwriters, singers and musicians.
“She’s done so much to lift up other artists, whether that’s a collaboration or a surprise pop-up performance,” she said. “She has a new show at the Nashville Symphony called Threads, and they have three female singers performing, and it’s just really beautiful. And these are newer singers in town. They’re not big names, and she could have taken center stage. But instead, she chose to lift others up, and that’s just something that every artist should do.”
Warner said Parton has created thousands of hospitality and entertainment jobs in Nashville, the latest being the impending grand opening of the SongTeller Hotel in the city’s center.
“You can see in the skyline Dolly’s incredibly sparkly building that’s all lit up, and you know, she’s leaving us with that,” she said. “That’s incredibly beautiful, and in recent months, we’ve seen a lot of job fairs and job posts getting that place staffed up, and it’s just going to be incredible when it opens. The entertainment and hospitality business can be very tough, and I have just never seen so many people happy to open something.”
The SongTeller Hotel isn’t the only stamp Parton has put on Nashville, with the singer using approximately $10 million in royalties from Whitney Houston’s cover of “I Will Always Love You” to buy a commercial strip mall and office complex in North Nashville, the hub of the city’s Black community.
“She referred to it as ‘the house that Whitney built,'” she said. “That area is a beautiful area, and that’s the kind of investment that needs to happen to support the community that’s there and has been there a long time.”
“I’ve been watching TikTok like crazy and crying with all of the Black women who’ve been mourning Dolly. That’s a kind of solidarity that we don’t deserve,” she added, referring to the U.S.’s racial history. “But she did the work. She affected everyone’s lives for the better.”
Putting East Tennessee on the map
Like most Tennesseans, Claudia Stallings’ memories of Parton stretch back to her childhood. Stallings said her father won a Porter Wagoner lookalike contest when she was a child, a win that he used to attract visitors to the downtown Hyatt where he worked as a public relations manager.
“Porter Wagoner was a big part of her career. She found fame with his partnership,” she said about Parton’s role on Wagoner’s County variety show that aired from 1960 to 1981. “There was another lady that my dad used to work with, who kind of looked like Dolly. They would dress up in their country wear, and people would literally ask them for autographs.”
Claudia Stallings
Stallings’ appreciation for Parton grew when she moved to Knoxville, which is 30 miles northwest of the star’s hometown, Sevierville. She said Parton poured hundreds of millions of dollars into Sevier County through multiple philanthropic efforts, including a scholarship that awards $15,000 to five graduating seniors in the county and a “buddy program” in the 1990s that paired middle schoolers and gave them $500 if they graduated high school. During the program’s tenure, the county’s dropout rate fell from 35 percent to 6 percent.
The Imagination Library, which gives children free books until their fifth birthday, also started in Sevier County. The library now serves children throughout the U.S., the U.K., Australia and the Republic of Ireland.
“She brought the area with her. She championed the area. She never apologized for her accent,” she said. “[Dolly] continued to say it just like we say it up here. Sever-ville. We don’t say Sevierville. She brought that to every interview that I’ve ever seen. But she championed the area that she was from. But she never strayed from the glitz, the glamor either. She stayed true to herself.”
Stallings said Knoxville is mourning the star, who recently had a children’s hospital named in her honor. She said everyone has pictures of Parton plastered wherever they can fit, and that the local Country radio station that gave Parton her start changed the call letters from WIVK to DOLLY. She doesn’t know if the change to the radio station is permanent, but doubts any Tennessean would have a problem with a station dedicated to Parton.
“I have so much respect for her immense wisdom. And when I look at just what she has done, simply from a a marketing standpoint, for herself and for the causes she champions, I mean, she was a professional like none I’d ever seen,” she said. “When people come to East Tennessee and rent out one of the many cabins, they’re often decorated with Dolly portraits. She made people want to visit here. It’s just another part of her legacy.”
A symbol of unity
Sara Lederach
Sara Lederach spent the first day after Parton’s passing reflecting on the star’s legacy, making phone calls with friends and endlessly scrolling through social media to take in every video and tribute. Although there was plenty of commentary about her music, her one-of-a-kind style, intelligence and sharp wit, Lederach said she realized the greatest gift that Parton gave was the ability to unify.
“She’s just such an important cultural icon to Tennessee and has invested so much in our communities here,” she said. “But also, the whole country, maybe the whole world, has come to understand her in a new way. She’s become the one thing that maybe we could all agree on in a country that is otherwise deeply divided.”
Lederach said Parton’s humility and practicality are a big part of why she’s so loved. “It wasn’t about ego or reinventing the wheel; it’s like she would identify a need and then just fill it. She made sure that people got the help they needed.”
The agent said Parton’s approach to business has inspired her to be an entrepreneur who centers her community, not just herself.
“I am self-employed, which means I wake up every morning unemployed. But like, this woman built an empire completely on her own terms and, somehow, did it in a way that didn’t center herself,” she said. “She centered much more on her message of joy and hope … We do so much cult of personality right now, and Dolly was not a cult of personality; she was a cult of joy.”
Crystal Morgan
Another agent, Crystal Morgan, said she’ll remember Parton most for her kindness. Morgan’s father relocated the family from Southern California to Nashville after co-writing Parton’s 1989 hit, “Why’d You Come In Here Looking Like That?”
A little overwhelmed to speak on the phone, Morgan sent Inman an excerpt from a journal entry she wrote after learning about Parton’s death.
“A friend said it best, ‘Everyone lost a family member this week.’ Dolly was one of the only things everyone could agree on. She was a peacemaker and a uniter in a place and time where peace and unity are rare,” she wrote. “She challenged injustice by giggling, smiling and staring it in the face with words of truth. Everyone straightens up for Dolly.”
“I have never had the privilege of meeting Dolly, but I know exactly what she would have met me with: kindness and a good time,” she added. “She was the embodiment of those things. She came from nothing and, for whatever reason, decided she was going to pull everyone up with her.”
What would Dolly do?
Carlson, Warner, Stallings, Lederach and Morgan all celebrated Parton in their own way on Tuesday: listening to Parton’s songs, putting on their best rhinestones, getting their nails done — Warner said her favorite East Nashville salon ran out of hot pink polish — or reading as many tributes to the star as they could.
However, they said they won’t stop there. What would really honor Parton, they said, is spreading kindness and acceptance, leading with intelligence and integrity, and finding ways to give back to their communities.
“We have some giant philanthropic shoes to fill if we want to continue her legacy,” Morgan said.
