I thought I would share a few insights from Dolly Parton’s life, career, and public persona that have always inspired me. What follows are three of the greatest lessons I think Dolly can teach preachers, teachers, and anyone who wishes to speak about sacred things.
1. She knew that confrontation isn’t the only way to make change.
We live in a polarized world. And in that world, standing up for a cause or speaking truth to power can be courageous and necessary. There are certainly times when confrontation is exactly what the moment requires.
But I sometimes wonder whether people with platforms have come to believe that confrontation and provocation are the normal means of bringing about change. Or for ideas to have a hearing.
Dolly Parton has always offered another possibility.
Think about Dolly alongside her 9 to 5 costars, Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda. Tomlin and Fonda have been outspoken and unapologetic about their political commitments. Dolly has generally taken a different approach, even while appearing with them as they perform their activist critiques. She has often been careful not to alienate the people who listen to her music, read her books, or love her movies. In those appearances, Dolly was careful to choose her words precisely so as to not inflame the situation.
And yet, when you look at the trajectory of Dolly’s career and influence, something remarkable becomes clear. She has impacted many of the very same communities that Tomlin and Fonda have advocated for—and arguably has reached them in ways neither could. Dolly cultivated one of the most remarkably broad and inclusive fan bases in American popular culture. She quietly moved the needle through her own money, philanthropy, institutions, and influence. And she modeled a gentle, witty form of out-narration in the public sphere. That is to say, she told a far more compelling story than the alternative!
She didn’t always defeat an opposing narrative by attacking it. Sometimes she simply told a better story. That strikes me as an important lesson for preachers and teachers.
Not every cultural battle needs to be fought head-on. Sometimes the most powerful thing we can do is tell a story so compelling, generous, beautiful, and human that people begin to imagine the world differently.
2. She worked from within tradition.
One of the things I love about Dolly is how deeply her work is rooted in the traditions that formed her. From murder ballads to gospel music, from Appalachian storytelling to songs about the particularities of her upbringing, Dolly’s genius has often been to take the material handed down to her and make something unmistakably her own.
Her songs emerge from a tradition and a community that bore her. That is part of why her voice feels so authentic. And I think there is a lesson here for those of us who speak the sacred. We are not inventing our message from scratch.
Preachers, teachers, theologians, artists, and other communicators of the sacred are inheritors of traditions. We receive stories, Scriptures, symbols, rituals, practices, melodies, metaphors, and ways of speaking that have been handed down to us. Our task is not to abandon tradition in order to become original.
Our task is to become ourselves within tradition.
It is precisely through learning the language, forms, and stories of the tradition that we begin to discover our own voice. Dolly didn’t become Dolly by escaping the traditions that formed her. She became Dolly by knowing them deeply enough to transform them.
3. Dolly innovated through authenticity.
Dolly brought a fresh perspective to her art without abandoning the tradition that gave her a voice. Consider Jolene. It is a remarkably vulnerable song. Dolly is pleading with another woman—an extraordinarily beautiful woman—to leave her man alone. And the fascinating thing is that Dolly doesn’t pretend that the other woman isn’t beautiful. She acknowledges it. Jolene is beautiful. She’s talented. She’s smart. She’s captivating. And Dolly is vulnerable enough to admit that she could lose the man she loves to her.
That’s not typical songwriting. Not in today’s culture anyway. It’s honest in a way that makes the song unforgettable. Then there is I Will Always Love You, a song born out of Dolly’s real and difficult relationship with her former boss and collaborator, Porter Wagoner. Again, the power comes from authenticity. Dolly’s genius was not simply that she could write a great song. It was that she could take something deeply personal and turn it into something other people could inhabit.
That is the work of the artist. And I think it is also the work of the preacher and teacher.
Innovate from the foundations of tradition.
And when you do, let authenticity and vulnerability be your friends. Don’t try to sound like someone else. Don’t try to manufacture originality. Tell the truth you have been given to tell. Speak from the place where tradition and your own strange, particular life meet. That is something AI cannot reproduce. AI can imitate styles. It can recombine language. It can produce something that sounds remarkably like a sermon, a song, or an essay.
But AI cannot be Dolly Parton. And it cannot be you. There is a singularity to a human life—to our particular histories, loves, wounds, failures, communities, memories, and hopes—that cannot simply be replicated. It is the “flesh and blood” of it all.
Perhaps that is one of the great gifts we have as communicators of the sacred. We are not called to be original for originality’s sake. We are called to be faithful enough to tradition, courageous enough to innovate, and honest enough to speak in our own voice. Those are my three favorite things I have learned from Dolly.
Tell a better story.
Know the tradition that formed you.
And have the courage to become yourself within it.
Dolly has been doing all three for a very long time. And I am a better preacher for paying attention.