On Feb. 22, 1997, geneticists from the University of Edinburgh announced they had successfully cloned the first mammal. They named it "Dolly" because the sheep had been cloned from the cell of a mammary gland, and “we couldn’t think of a more impressive pair of glands than Dolly Parton’s.”
Parton appreciated the joke. She was never shy about her breasts, joking, "I was the first woman to burn my bra. It took the fire department four days to put it out!" She was also upfront about her plastic surgeries. "If I see something sagging, bagging, or dragging, I'm gonna have it nipped, tucked, or sucked!" and "My boobs are real — they're real expensive."
This kind of familiarity with her audience endeared her to millions of fans beyond her C&W base. Her crossover hit "Jolene" struck a chord with millions of women, as did her other monster success, "9 to 5."
Her generosity was legendary. "In her home county of Sevier, Tennessee, she raised $500,000 at a benefit concert for LeConte Medical Center, which opened in 2010 with a dedicated Dolly Parton Center for Women’s Services," the editors of Nature wrote on the occasion of her death. "She also donated $1 million to pediatric infectious-disease research at Vanderbilt, and this February, East Tennessee Children’s Hospital in Knoxville was renamed Dolly Parton Children’s Hospital after an undisclosed 'generational' gift, funding a new pediatric residency program, rural telehealth and specialist recruitment." She gave the Pediatric Cancer Program at Tennessee’s Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital $1 million in 2017 and then another $1 million to study infectious diseases in 2022.
“Scientific breakthroughs should be named after her but for a different reason,” said Jens Foell, a neuropsychologist and science editor based in Heidelberg, Germany, writing on Bluesky. “She’s been a force for science and knowledge for decades.”
An early funder of COVID-19 research, her funding led to breakthroughs in treatment and the COVID vaccine. She recorded a version of "Jolene" substituting the word "vaccine."
Parton started a landmark program called "Imagination Library" in 1995. Inspired by her father, who couldn't read, the program provided free books to children from birth to age five. To date, more than 330 million books have been donated to kids in five countries.
For many young people in the United States, the singer is best known for the Dolly Parton Imagination Library, an initiative launched in 1995 that, through a public–private partnership, sends a free book each month to children from birth to age five.
Today, one in six US children under five receives books from the library, according to the organization. Research into the programme by the Dollywood Foundation, which oversees the library, found that it increased how often parents read to their children and improved children’s scores on language and literacy measures.
Ryan Dunlavey, a Bluesky user and illustrator, posted a letter from Parton sent to Imagination Library ‘graduates’. It reads: “There is no limit to what you can do. Or how far you can go. Just remember the lessons my family taught me — dream big dreams; learn everything you can learn; and care for all those who care for you.”
"Kids participating in the program read more often and for longer than their peers, and were also better prepared for kindergarten," writes Jake Currie in Nautilus. She and her family were so proud of Imagination Library that her family has requested donations be made there in lieu of flowers.
She paid $500 to every kid who graduated high school in her rural Tennessee county of Sevier, and the dropout rate went from 35% to 6%. She was awarded the Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy in 2022, which honored her as "one of the entertainment world's most generous philanthropists."
"I'm kind of addicted to the feeling of giving," she once said. "Knowing that I'm doing something good for someone else."
She fed that "addiction" her entire adult life.
