Thank you very much, Dolly!

BarcelonaThese days everyone has written a line about Dolly Parton. Normal. After seventy years of career, we all have some fond memory of her. In most of the published texts, however, it is particularly relevant that people, instead of mentioning the joy of when they had seen her in concert, the talent she had for writing songs or how impeccable she always was on stage, which is what is usually said about artists, spoke of the sadness they felt for the loss. This, which might seem strange, is not at all. It is the most normal reaction to the loss of Dolly Parton, since throughout her prolific life she won our hearts by doing things for each and every one of us. It is normal that everyone loved her so much. Parton was not just an artist of the kind who periodically come to sell us their material and then lock themselves in their mansion. She never disappeared. She was continuously present in people's lives. Because she was much more than an artist. She was an institution. And we all owe her a great deal of gratitude.

We owe her thanks, for example, for never losing her class pride. For daring to dream big despite being the fourth daughter of an illiterate couple who lived in a wooden cabin without light or running water in the middle of the mountains. Also for not allowing her disadvantaged background to steal her smile or serve as an excuse to lose her principles at convenience. But above all, we must thank her for never hiding it. Or rather, for always explaining it. Everywhere. Because she knew that this message of dignity and self-love could reach boys and girls who had also been born in contexts as disadvantaged as hers. Children who needed to be able to grow up with hope. Parton sealed it for history in "Coat of many colors, in which she recounted how much she liked the jacket her mother had made her by sewing together scraps of fabric because she couldn't buy her one. "Made only from rags / But I wore it so proudly / Although we had no money / Well, I was rich as I could be", she said about the jacket in the song. Thank you for those lyrics, Dolly.

Also many thanks, dear Dolly, for never losing your pride in being from the periphery. Having been born in a place about which so many prejudices are held as the Smoky Mountains would have been something that many other artists would have left behind once the spotlights were already illuminating them. But you took the term hillbilly through triumph, with your natural elegance to often joke about it all, not leaving it aside in your compositions and, even better, turning it into an enormously efficient selling point that has accompanied you throughout all your decades of career.

Proud and visionary

Parton's origins were such a point of pride that 40 years ago – notice how ahead of her time she was... – she bought a struggling amusement park twenty minutes from the town where she was born and made it work because she was a great businesswoman. So much so that a new ecosystem of jobs and adjacent businesses flourished there, greatly improving the area's economy. What star would open a park in a place like that, if they all want to be associated with penthouses in Manhattan and mansions in Bel-Air? Thank you, Dolly, for being so real. Your message seems local but it's global. Like you. And thank you also for naming the park Dollywood. Among your many talents is also that of naming.

Also thank you, Dolly, for also having been a feminist. Your context didn't make it easy for you at all, and you've been the one who has been the most. Thank you for having been a pioneer in this. You've been a woman who decided not to have children, who decided to be an entrepreneur, who broke glass ceilings, who wanted to live life outside the canons of beauty – which you consciously took to parody. Thank you also for having shattered with accomplished facts the gentlemen who opine that at a certain age a woman is not fit to dedicate herself to show business and should retire. Without entering into direct conflict with anyone, you have helped many women empower themselves through example. An option as valid as any other. Essential in this too, Dolly.

'Mother'

Thank you, obviously, for not only thinking about the LGBTIQ+ community when Pride month arrives. Thank you for defending your gay and lesbian fans in interviews, even though it had a negative impact on your huge Christian fandom. Thank you for being a Christian of the Bible and not of the Pope. Also thank you for employing trans people who were not hired anywhere for your personal team and for your park. Thank you for endorsing the gay day at your park and for supporting equal marriage. Also for criticizing Tennessee's anti-trans laws. Thank you for saying that if you had been born a man you would be a drag queen. Thank you for doing all this without considering how much money it cost you or how many malicious headlines it could generate for you. How many people must have embraced your gestures? They have not been in vain.

Generous as no one

In times of neoliberal selfishness disguised as an entrepreneurial mindset, you have shown that it is possible to be a great businesswoman without being a miser who bases a large part of her business success on living in a tax haven. Thank you for having given up being a billionaire and for having converted a huge part of your lifetime earnings into donations to such noble causes. Thank you for having taken a million dollars out of your pocket during the pandemic and for having invested in Moderna's vaccine. Thank you for having invested in spaces with a predominant black community with the money you earned from Whitney Houston's version of I will always love you. Thank you for having reduced school dropout by 30% with your Buddy Program scholarships. And thank you for sending a book a month to every child who requests it with Imagination Library. You have already distributed over 330 million. Incredible. But above all, thank you for doing so since before social awareness was something commercially exploitable. And thank you for leaving self-financing systems so that this engine of solidarity can outlive you. You have been so generous that you have overflowed the present, and you will also be in the future.

Thank you also for never falling into provocations. For never losing the elegance that some, due to their origins, believed you didn't have. Thank you for never saying a bad word or ever shouting. Thank you for responding to a gentleman very interested in your live hair styling on TV, to whom you unfortunately couldn't say how long it took to do them because you wore a wig and they were already done. And thank you for having quickly and boldly responded to an Oprah Winfrey who morbidly asked about cosmetic surgery, that you had had "some small touch-ups", and adding "and some big ones", in reference to your breasts.

Iconic always

Thank you, dear Dolly, for all these great things, but also for all the small ones, which coming from you also became great. Thank you for prioritizing your dignity as an author over making a lot of money and telling Elvis Presley that you were not willing to share the copyright if he recorded I will always love you, as he had asked you. Thank you for playing the guitar live with kilometer-long acrylic nails as if it were the most normal thing in the world. Thank you for forcing Donald Trump to lower all the flags in the entire country halfway in tribute to a woman like you, who represented everything he hated. Many thanks!

Thank you for diving into the gas station business at 80 years old. And thank you for including a pet area called Doggy Parton. Thank you for stealing the monopoly of this business from the heteropatriarchy, in short. I can't wait to do Route 65 just to stop for gas at your place and buy all your merch. And many thanks for helping people who love each other against the current to stand firm by telling them they are islands in the stream. It couldn't be more beautiful, the way you interpreted it with Kenny Rogers. And thank you for helping us,with Here you come again, not to feel so guilty –or even right...– if we relapse with our exes. What a great storyteller you have been!

Always pop

Thank you for so generously allowing yourself to be photographed by Leibovitz, Ritts, Avedon, Benson, and Langdon, and for leaving us this formidable pop legacy. And also for following fashion and simultaneously breaking it with such grace and daring. Thank you for entering a drag queens competition where you were imitated, for losing it, and for telling us about it. You, always so iconic. Thank you for causing the Buckingham orchestra to play your worker's anthem, 9 to 5, at the gates of the palace of the man who has worked the least in European history, Charles III. Comedic and political until the end.

And to finish, but no less importantly, thank you for writing 3,000 songs while doing all these other things, and thank you for leaving one written ready for twenty years from now, when you would have written a hundred. We now have a reason, however small, to remain excited for the next two decades. Infinite thanks, Dolly. For everything. There will be no other like you. And this time it's not a cliché, because of all those who could have done a lot, until now, no one has done as much as you. We will always love you!