Remembering Dolly: Six Lessons From the Life of America’s Grandma

Here’s a fun fact you may not know about me: I freaking adore country music. When I was really little, it was my favorite genre. And why wouldn’t it be? I grew up in a family of crazy hillbillies who migrated to Michigan and brought their rich Appalachian culture with them. Country was nearly ubiquitous in every facet of my life for the first chunk of it. Shania Twain was my idol as a toddler. I have fond memories of listening to Brooks and Dunn in my dad’s old truck and going through my grandma’s dusty Alan Jackson cassettes. And of course, we had Queen Dolly.

I never dove as deep into Dolly Parton’s discography as I should have, but a part of me has always been fascinated by her. I recall going to Dixie Stampede when my family travelled to Tennessee on vacation. I remember my first amusement park experience was Dollywood. My parents kicked themselves for not getting tickets for a day later, when Miss Dolly herself would make an appearance at the park. It’s sad that I came so close to crossing paths with her as a child, and yet I missed it by a hair.

Now, I’ll never get that opportunity again. As I’m certain you’ve heard by now, Dolly Parton passed away a few days back at the age of 80. The closest thing I’ve seen to monoculture in a post-social media world has been the enormous outpouring of love for her and what she has come to represent. I have even seen multiple pushes to make her a literal saint. To say Dolly was beloved would be the understatement of the century. She was more than just beloved. She was America’s grandma.

I’ve learned so much more about the life of this incredible woman in the past few days, and it has been inspiring me to seek out little ways to honor her memory. Now that she is no longer with us, we all need to carry on the work she began. These are just a few lessons I’ve gleaned from Dolly’s illustrious legacy.

1. Reading is knowledge, and knowledge is power.

We as a nation are experiencing a literacy crisis. There are more illiterate adults today than there were in 1870. This is a significant decline since the 1970s, when less than one percent of the population was illiterate. I can see correlations between this slow drop in literacy and the increasing animosity in our society. Reading allows you to understand different perspectives. Reading encourages critical thinking. Reading is how people learn new things. Is it a coincidence that as we’ve decentered reading as an American pastime, we’ve also seen an increase in division and conflict?

Dolly saw a need, and she had the power to do something. So she started the Imagination Library, a service that sends books to kids for free. The decision was prompted by her own father’s inability to read. In a statement on the website, she said:

“When I was growing up in the hills of East Tennessee, I knew my dreams would come true. I know there are children in your community with their own dreams. They dream of becoming a doctor or an inventor or a minister. Who knows, maybe there is a little girl whose dream is to be a writer and singer…The seeds of these dreams are often found in books and the seeds you help plant in your community can grow across the world.”

She always had a heart for kids who grew up in similar situations to her. Dolly didn’t grow up in a gilded castle. She was once a little girl in a destitute part of Appalachia — much like my own grandmother was, many years ago. She may have gone on to become a household name, but her heart was always with families like mine. Which leads me to the next lesson Dolly taught me…

2. Stand up for the working class.

When Dolly wrote “9 to 5,” it was a statement. Like I mentioned before, she was not born into a wealthy family by any means. The nepo babies taking over the charts today will never know the struggle she had to endure to get to where she is. The woman fought tooth and acrylic nail for the respect she deserved. And all the while, she never forgot where she came from. In a recent conversation I had on Reddit, another commenter lamented the fact that there were no femme Springsteens championing the working class. Enter Dolly.

Like my own daddy, Dolly was a supporter of unions, being part of the American Federation of Musicians Local 257 and making it a point to get her band the wages they deserved. She supported migrant workers the rest of the country turned their nose at, covering Woody Guthrie’s “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos),” dedicated to the memory of 28 Mexican farmhands whose deaths were largely ignored. She even stood up for ladies who wound up in the world’s oldest profession, with the understanding that many sex workers were simply sweet girls with broken dreams and no other options. In fact, this leads to my next point that…

3. You can dress scandalously and still be a good person.

Dolly was the poster girl for not judging a book by its cover. On the surface, she had the outward appearance of the traditional “bimbo”: blonde, thin waist, big boobs, lots of makeup, and little clothing. This was not an accident. Dolly herself had said that she styled her own signature look around “the town tramp” whom everyone looked down upon. But young Dolly saw the beauty in her and wanted to be her nonetheless. That was one of her most underrated gifts. She realized beauty in places — and in people — you wouldn’t think to look.

I think a lot about the ways women are judged for owning their sexualities and bodies. I’ve experienced it myself. I recognize that my own signature look is somewhere between a drag queen, a Bratz doll, and probably the town tramp as well. But as Dolly showed us, wearing skimpy costumes and lots of sparkles doesn’t make you less of a person. This is a woman who posed for Playboy of all publications. She didn’t practice modesty the way American Christianity pushes. She had the understanding that modesty is a mindset, not a certain look. I’d guarantee Dolly is closer to the heart of God than any of these tradwife influencers with their prairie dresses that could double as a tent, and all while wearing a sequined unitard.

4. You can be a Christian and not a bigot.

Speaking of American Christianity, it’s no secret that many folks who claim the title of “Christian” in this country are not the ambassadors we want for the faith. “Christian values” has become shorthand for “defending the (relatively new) concept of the nuclear family to the detriment of anyone who doesn’t fit that box.” If you’re a man, you gotta be a big strong dude and marry a woman and make her submit to you. If you’re a woman, better give up all your dreams to a man who doesn’t know how to do his own laundry and pop out his babies for the Lord. That’s the dream we’ve been sold. But Dolly taught us there is a better way.

Dolly was a proper Christian, if a bit of an outlaw Christian. She understood the true tenets of the faith. Like me, she cut her teeth playing in churches and built up a strong foundation for her spiritual beliefs. In her prayer life, she regularly asked God “How can you use me?” and “What can I do today?” I can imagine her saying as Isaiah 6:8 says: “Here am I. Send me!” She knew she had a mission here on this planet to be the hands and feet of Jesus in a very tangible way. Unlike many others who have co-opted the name of Christ, Dolly refused to engage with the widespread bigotry that permeates the religion as it stands. She spent her life proving to the world that being a strong ally to the queer community and being a steadfast Christian is not an oxymoron. In fact, standing up for the oppressed and downtrodden is exactly what we’re supposed to do. She was a true example of the faith. In a world of Donald Christians, be a Dolly Christian.

5. You don’t have to be a literal mother to be a “Mom.”

This one hit home for me as someone who desperately wants to be a mother but is afraid that ship has sailed. Dolly also longed for motherhood, but for a variety of health reasons, her dreams were never able to come to fruition either. But she realized God had another plan for her, a plan she embraced wholeheartedly. She wasn’t supposed to be the mother of a person. She was to be the mother of a movement. She started viewing herself as a “Fairy Godmother” or “Mother Goose” of sorts, with her book program introducing her to an entirely new crop of kids. In a way, Dolly became America’s mother and grandmother.

Dolly proved that you don’t have to squeeze out a biological child to have an impact on the next generation. Going back to the spiritual side of things, I often think about how our society’s current understanding of the Bible presses people to “go forth and multiply.” There are entire “quiverfull” sects that emphasize reproducing as much as humanly possible to “raise up more soldiers for the Lord.” It’s easy to forget that the Gospel has never been about passing down your own bloodline. It’s about the blood of Christ and passing down His legacy of love. Dolly demonstrated this in action. Through her work on Earth, she has done more to further the Kingdom of God than any of those quiverfull weirdos.

6. Stay humble and remember your roots.

Dolly was a superstar. Dolly was an icon. But most importantly, Dolly was a little old Appalachian lady just like my own grandmother. She saw the world and everything it had to offer, but she never lost sight of where she came from. At the end of the day, her heart remained in those storied mountains, with the honest, hard-working folks she’d grown up around. She had a soft spot for the land that gave her life, writing these words in her 1972 song “My Tennessee Mountain Home”:

“Sittin’ on the front porch on a summer afternoon

In a straight back chair on two legs leaned against the wall

As I watch the kids a-playin’ with their June bugs on a string

And chase the glowin’ fireflies when evenin’ shadows fall

In my Tennessee mountain home

Life is as peaceful as a baby’s sigh

In my Tennessee mountain home

Crickets are singing in the fields near by…”

In the 90s, Dolly promised to give $500 to every kid who went on to graduate from high school in her home county, essentially causing the drop-out rate to plummet. She has donated a good chunk of her fortune to disaster relief and other initiatives in East Tennessee. Through it all, she never forgot where she came from. I’ll leave you with this quote from The Christian Post in 2019 that I feel embodies her life and legacy:

“Every day I pray for God to lead me and to take out all the wrong things, wrong people in my life, and bring all the right things, right people, and to let me glorify Him and uplift mankind, to do something in this world to make it a little better than it was. And let me be a light and a vessel to be used.”

That’s what it’s all about, y’all. In a world of insincerity that rewards braggarts and egotism, let us all be more like Dolly. Bring a little music and sparkle to this dark world, and leave it brighter than you found it. Together, we can continue the work she started.

A Different Kind of Motherhood: Learning to Nurture Your Passions, Community, and Self

Once again, I was given a surprisingly relevant prompt for what I already had planned to write about. It’s funny how this thing knows me.

If your future self could send you one sentence, what do you hope it would say?

I guess the sentence I’d most want to hear from Future Jessa right now would be “It all turns out okay,” but that doesn’t narrow things down, as there are a lot of potential “its” in my situation. There’s my uncertain living situation, which I’ve written about a bit already. There’s that matter of me still not knowing what I want to do with my life as a now thirtysomething, since music therapy didn’t pan out. And of course, there’s that nagging feeling that I’m trapped in the burning house that is America, and as the walls are crumbling, who the hell knows what rights I’ll have left as a queer woman. I would love a future version of me to tell me I get some semblance of a happy ending out of all of this. I’d love a crumb of reassurance that the story I’m living through every day still has many pages of bliss left to write, and relatively little hardship. I want to know that the worst is behind me now. And when all is said and done, I want to leave behind something — or someone — to carry on my legacy.

I always thought my mark on this world would come in two forms — through the things I create, and through the people I will eventually create. I wanted to be an artist, but I also wanted to be a mother. Well, maybe not always. The idea of making a baby with most of the guys I went to school with was absolutely nauseating, even if lizard-brain still wanted to get laid. I would eventually get married and have sex (in that order, I believed, because I was a good girl), but not a damn soul was coming outta this uterus. That thing was closed for business.

Then I met and dated this guy in college who already had a daughter. I loved this dude, whom I still speak with now and then to this day, but I freaking adored this little girl. I fell into the role of stepmom-lite with a surprising amount of ease for a girl who’d previously believed she had the maternal instincts of a football. I remember going to Burger King to fetch her some nuggets and eating them together on the stairs, with her cuddled up next to me. It was the weirdest feeling, this twinge of motherly love toward a tiny person. And wouldn’t you know it, my ovaries started tingling real bad.

But I couldn’t have kids of my own. Not then. I wasn’t stable enough. We’d both end up on the streets.

Time went by, I got married twice, and still, over the course of both relationships, we could never quite achieve the amount of stability required to safely bring a child into this world. I’ve worked with children many times throughout my life, but I’ve never had the chance to raise one myself, and it breaks my heart. I’m approaching my mid-thirties, and while I know women have given birth well into their thirties and even forties, a part of me wonders if it’ll ever be my turn.

Always a caregiver, never a mom.

Maybe its just a side-effect of the barrage of pro-natalist propaganda coming to us from the government, but part of me feels like I’ve failed as a freaking biological lifeform if I can’t even reproduce. Even dumb seagulls are better at spreading their genetic material. And it’s a damn shame because I’d like to think I have some freaking good genes to pass on. Thanks, Mom.

Lately, though, I’ve been re-evaluating what motherhood even means to me. Is it really so important that I be a mother in order to matter? Stevie Nicks, Joan Jett, and Debbie Harry are all famously childfree, and yet their names will still go down in history. Another classic rock queen, singer and guitarist Bonnie Raitt, once said, “I feel that my job is to mother the causes that I’m involved in.” And then it kind of hit me. I’m already the mother of something, in a way.

I studied Arabic a little in college. I’ve always been fascinated by the language, having grown up near Dearborn (which is not the scary place conservatives think it is, unless you think swanky-ass hookah bars are scary). I remember a really interesting concept where, after someone has a child, their name changes to reflect their status as a parent of that child. This name is called a kunya. In a way, its the reverse of how we in the West approach names. Theoretically, if a guy named Gray had a son, his son’s name would be Grayson, as in “Gray’s son.” (I am using a real life example, as I truly used to know a friendly uke-wielding hippie dude named Gray and his aptly named son, Grayson.) That’s basically how many of our last names evolved. But Arabic is entirely different. Let’s say, for example, I finally had my little girl and I named her Cadence. If I spoke Arabic, my new name would essentially be “Cadence’s Mother.”

But what if you never actually have children? Can you still get the lofty title of “umm.” In Arabic, that answer is a resounding yes! The word is also used metaphorically to reflect distinctive traits people may have. One may be the “mother of the cats” if they’re a cat mom, or even the “mother of the chubby face” if they’ve just got cute pinchable cheeks.

Maybe I need to look at motherhood more like that. Maybe we’re all mothering something in a strange way, even if we don’t immediately realize it.

In my last post, I mentioned the joke rap comedy group I started with my two favorite men on this planet and whoever else is unfortunate enough to be in the room with us at the time. What I didn’t mention was the massive multiplayer 12-minute monster of a megasong we were all working on. It started life as a stupid TikTok video that up until recently was my most viewed ’Tok. I was messing around with the synths and drum machines in my DAW and trying to make a Thriller/Ghostbusters-type beat from memory, with disastrous results. Then, I showed Luke and David, and they ran with it. Soon, the number of rappers on the song somehow doubled as more and more folks wanted in on the project. Before we knew it, the song had ballooned to an absolute behemoth, comprising well over 100 individual tracks as of writing. Pray for my MacBook, please.

But the subject matter of the song was what really surprised me. At first, we started making this entirely unserious song about how, because I’m the shadowy figure who makes all the beats in the background, I am the BEAT MOTHER, this benevolent but fierce goddess of sick beats, bro. It was going to be entirely unserious…until I started realizing how serious my friends were about their love for me. I started tearing up a little as a few of my collaborators recorded their parts because I started to realize just how much my friends care about and respect me. That’s all I’ve ever wanted in life. Music has always been my conduit to the outside world, ever since I was a selectively mute autistic child who could barely utter a world to her peers. I was so lonely, but I couldn’t make friends. Somehow, twenty years later, that little girl still gets overwhelmed when she truly grasps how loved she really is. I’m so lucky to have the chosen family I’ve found through music.

That’s what the whole BEAT MOTHER title came to represent, as absolutely bonkers and silly it was at first. I end the song with a much more introspective and somber tone than it opens with, having intentionally changed the ending to reflect my new realizations. In the final few lines, I say:

“I did it all, and man, I did it loud. To think I did it all to make little Jessie proud.”

Circling back to the question at the very beginning of this post, sometimes I like to imagine the opposite. Sometimes I imagine myself speaking to that scared little kid who couldn’t fit in anywhere if she tried. I’d like to tell her that it will be okay in the end, and that things will be hard, but we are stronger than anything that will come our way. We’re resilient. In a way, I feel like I’m stepping into a motherhood role with my own inner child. As Whitney sang, children are the future, and the greatest love of all is learning to love yourself. I think she was onto something with that song.

Maybe I won’t be the mother of anything more than a couple of decent songs. But I’m learning to be okay with that. Nurturing my friends’ creativities and passions and helping them make music they can be proud of is something to celebrate too.

Help me relocate with my kitty, Krubby! We’re close to our goal, which will be enough to cover a Uhaul and a nice bed for us! Even just spreading the word is appreciated!