Do we like Dolly Parton?
Our score: 9 out of 10. She backed LGBTQ+ people in her own words for decades, funded vaccine research and gave books and money to her community, with one awkward PR call.
Dolly grew up in Tennessee's Smoky Mountains, one of a big family, and turned a kid's talent into one of the great songwriting careers. Hundreds of songs, including Jolene, Coat of Many Colors and I Will Always Love You, added up to more than 100 million sales. She went into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1999, then built a business empire that included Dollywood.
On the harm test she's about as clean as they come. In a 2023 interview she said, “I know and love them all, and I do not judge,” about the gay and trans people in her life, and said gender-affirming care matters to trans people. She tells it through faith: judgment is God's business, not hers.
Her songs matched her words. Her 1991 song Family pictured a household that turned nobody away, gay people included, and she had a big gay fan base long before it was fashionable. She says she stays out of party politics, so we're not going to claim her for any team, but on people she stood where this page stands.
Her money went where the need was. She started the Imagination Library in 1995 to fight illiteracy, and it has handed out over 300 million free books. She gave more than $12 million to families after the 2016 Sevier County wildfires, and $1 million for Hurricane Helene flood victims in 2024.
She also helped on the science side. In April 2020 she announced a $1 million donation to Vanderbilt toward Covid-19 research, and Vanderbilt was part of the Moderna vaccine trials. Then she got the jab on camera and sang a tune about it. That's the opposite of the anti-vax slide, and the planet doesn't come up as a sore spot either.
There is one mark on the ledger. In 2017, when her longtime publicist Kirt Webster was accused of sexual assault and harassment, she fired him but said she was hoping the accusations weren't true. Some fans thought that was a soft response; the Fox News report carried no response from Webster himself. It's a blip, not a pattern.