Blog Posts

Remembering Dolly Parton, Champion of Childhood Literacy

By Jodi Esposito

Yesterday, the world lost Dolly Parton. She was 80, and for as long as I can remember, she has been a fixture in my life in one way or another. I imagine that is true for most of you reading this too. 

My favorite holiday movie growing up was A Smoky Mountain Christmas. Dolly starred as Lorna Davis, a country star who trades a hectic life in Los Angeles for a quiet holiday in the Tennessee mountains, only to discover her cabin is already home to seven orphaned children. By the end of the film, that ragtag group has become a family. I remember watching Lorna's easy, selfless love for those kids, and it stuck with me. That devotion was not a role Dolly was playing. It was who she was. 

Nowhere is that clearer than in the legacy she leaves behind through The Imagination Library. Dolly launched the program in 1995 in her home county in Tennessee, inspired by her father, who could not read or write. He grew up the child of sharecroppers, in a one room cabin with no books besides the Bible, and Dolly said his illiteracy was something he carried shame over his whole life. "He was the smartest man I have ever known but I know in my heart his inability to read probably kept him from fulfilling all of his dreams," she once wrote. She built her Imagination Library so that fewer children would grow up wondering, the way her father did, what they might have become. 

What began as a small mailing list for children in Sevier County grew into a movement spanning the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and Ireland. Every child enrolled receives one free book a month, mailed with their own name on the cover, from the time they are born until they turn five. More than 330 million books have gone out under Dolly's name so far. 

Here at Reading Is Fundamental, we have always believed that access to books changes what is possible for a child. The research bears this out. Children who grow up with 100 or more books at home have close to a 90 percent chance of finishing ninth grade. For children with no books at home, that number drops to just 30 percent. Dolly understood this long before the research existed to prove it, and we have always considered The Imagination Library a friend to our own mission. We are honored to help carry that work forward. 

Today we are grieving alongside families, librarians, teachers and readers everywhere Dolly touched, whether through her music, her generosity, or a book that showed up in the mail. In A Smoky Mountain Christmas, Dolly's character tells the children she has taken in, "The magic is inside you. There ain't no crystal ball." None of us knows what the future holds. But because of Dolly, millions of children got to grow up believing in their own magic, one book at a time. That is a legacy worth continuing, together.