Dolly Parton once imagined children of her own. God had other plans, and somehow her family ended up becoming much, much bigger.
In the days since Dolly Parton's death, one of the questions that followed her throughout her life has inevitably resurfaced: Why didn't she have children? Dolly answered it many times, usually with the generosity and candor that characterized so much of what she did, although her answer, understandably, wasn't always quite the same.
When she and her beloved husband, Carl Dean, were young, children were simply part of the future they imagined. “We just assumed we would have kids,” she once explained. They even discussed names. In a wonderfully Dolly detail, as shared by Yahoo, she remembered wondering whether their children would be tall like Carl or “little squats like me.” A daughter, they'd decided, would be called Carla. “We talked about it, and we dreamed it,” she said, “but it wasn't meant to be.”
That little Carla never arrived. Nor did any of the other children they had imagined, and Dolly admitted that for a time she wondered whether she should regret it. Eventually, though, she realized she didn't. “I haven't missed it like I thought I might,” she said in 2023.
She knew herself well enough to suspect that motherhood would have changed everything: “I would have been a great mother, I think,” she once told The Guardian, but believed she would have found it terribly difficult to leave her children while she worked. “I would probably have given up everything else. Everything would have changed. I probably wouldn't have been a star.”
Meet Aunt Granny
Yet Dolly's life was hardly devoid of children. As the fourth of 12 growing up in Tennessee, she'd had plenty of practice caring for little ones before she was old enough to contemplate having her own. And when fame and money arrived, five of her younger brothers and sisters came to live with Dolly and Carl in Nashville. “We sent them to school,” she later recalled in an interview with Fresh Air, and when those siblings grew up and had children of their own, Dolly and Carl acquired rather wonderful new identities: Aunt Granny and Uncle Pee-Paw.
Dolly embraced the role with gusto. She helped nieces and nephews with cars and college, adored the next generation and once joked that she'd ended up “saddled with a bunch of kids but no kids of my own.” Children, meanwhile, seemed to adore her right back. Dolly thought she knew why. “I think kids relate to me because they think of me like a Mother Goose or a Fairy Godmother,” she once said.
It's hard to imagine anyone better qualified for the Fairy Godmother job, but Dolly's family eventually became considerably larger than even the Parton clan could manage.
An even bigger family
In 1995, she created the Imagination Library in honor of her father, Robert Lee Parton, a man she described as extraordinarily smart but who had never learned to read or write. Dolly knew how much that had limited him, so she began sending free books to young children in her home county in Tennessee. Thirty-one years later, the program operates across five countries and has delivered more than 300 million books.
The enormous numbers are impressive, but it's the way Dolly thought about the individual child that says far more. The books arrive every month from birth until age 5, addressed to the child personally, and Dolly loved the fact that her smallest readers knew the parcel belonged to them. At a National Press Club appearance, she recalled how children thought she personally put the books in their mailboxes, “kind of like Peter Rabbit.” She was delighted by it.
She also knew that children waited for those packages. Today, 3-year-old Simon Dockery in Georgia is one of them. His mother told Reuters this week that Simon looks forward to checking the mailbox to discover which Dolly book has arrived, while his baby brother Samuel now receives his own.
Multiply those two little boys by millions and Dolly's extraordinary reach becomes easier to understand: homes she never entered, children whose names she never knew, and shelves slowly filling with books because somewhere in Tennessee she had decided they ought to have them. And when those children turned 5, Dolly didn't simply stop sending the books. She wrote to them.
Her little readers received a "graduation letter" encouraging them to keep reading, dreaming, and being kind. She reminded them that they could become anything they wanted to be and told them she would always be rooting for them.
Her most important role
Perhaps that is why Dolly's description of herself as “the book lady” feels so apt, and something rather lovely! Her father had lived long enough to see the Imagination Library begin to flourish, and Dolly recalled how proud he was when children started calling his famous daughter by that name. For a woman with no shortage of impressive titles, it was one she treasured. In fact, she later wrote:
“My Daddy told me the Imagination Library was probably the most important thing I had ever done.”
And it puts something else Dolly once said into perspective. Speaking to Oprah Winfrey in 2020, she reflected on the children she and Carl never had and the life that had unfolded instead:
“I didn't have children because I believed that God didn't mean for me to have kids so everybody's kids could be mine.”
Perhaps the sweetest part is that many of those children were far too young to understand who their benefactor actually was. Grammys meant nothing to them, nor did number-one records, sold-out concerts or the fact that their book lady had written one of the most famous songs in the world. But a package arriving in the mail especially for them? That they understood perfectly well.
And if that's not enough, during COVID, Dolly spent 10 Thursday nights reading picture books aloud on YouTube for children stuck at home. It's one of those little details that says so much about her: Somewhere, children were having a difficult time, and Dolly's instinct was to sit down and read them a story.
Although the queen of country never did get to have the little Carla she and Carl once imagined, she did find herself surrounded by an enormous and rather unconventional family, some related by blood and millions more connected to her by a book arriving on a doormat.
She once said everybody's kids could be hers. It seems that in a very important sense they were.
