Rest In Peace Dolly Parton

This sucks :( 

A true American original.   RIP.   

Post from family 

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DceNXgPJyZ9/?igsi=MW81NDI1ZnByZnJ1NQ==

This is terrible news. Talk about breaking the mold when they made her. 

What an icon. So generous. So down to earth. Just a joy. Promoting literacy for children, equal rights, damn, just so many great acts of kindness. So inspiring.  

The world's a little less bright today. Maybe by reflecting on Dolly's incredible life, we can realize we ALL can do better.  

Such a beautiful spirit. Rest in peace, Dolly.

Summertime, midmorning, and I’m sitting in the living room of what was then Jerry Garcia and Bob Hunter’s house, under the redwoods up a canyon in Larkspur, fifteen or twenty miles north of San Francisco, sitting there in an old easy chair reworking my notes on last night’s three sets at the Fillmore (“An Evening with the Grateful Dead,” the show is titled, and Jerry played all three sets, straight through from 8:30 until nearly 2:00 a.m., two sets with the Dead and one with their country-cousin stablemates, the New Riders of the Purple Sage, and will do the same tonight and again tomorrow night; yet while he’s playing, he looks as if he could happily go on forever). While I’m sitting there, Jerry, yawning and stretching and scratching like a freshly de-hibernated bear, is puttering around the stereo in search of a record by a vocalist he’s so far identified only as “my favorite girl singer,” and Jerry’s lady, Mountain Girl (a great, gorgeous creature, an Amazon’s Amazon, a Valkyrie with raven tresses, the sort of awesome Venus-of-Willendorf beauty who inspires me to pure press-agent flackery, the “160-pounds-of-eye-poppin’-pulchritude” school of prose)… ahem… and as I was saying, Mountain Girl is banging around in the kitchen fixing breakfast for me and Jerry and Hunter (who is right now standing in the doorway blinking myopically behind his enormous, sleep-frazzled Pecos Pete mustache), and Hunter’s lady, Christy, is out back playing with Jerry and MG’s two kids, and Jerry, dark eyes suddenly aglint behind his dandelion-yellow tinted glasses, hollers, “Eureka!” or “Aha!” or whatever and plunges his hand wrist-deep into a disordered stack of albums and comes up with… no, no, not Joplin, not Grace Slick, not Joni Mitchell or Joan Baez or Laura Nyro, not even Tina Turner or Big Mama Thornton, but … Dolly Parton?

Who’da thought it? Who would ever have supposed that the favorite girl singer of the spiritual leader of the Heaviest Rock-’n’-Roll Band in the Known World would turn out to be my favorite girl singer … Dolly Parton, the fairest wildflower that ever bloomed in Tennessee, the best female country vocalist since the prime of Kitty Wells? Far—how you say?—flung! Far fuckin’ flung!

Jerry’s at the turntable now, flipping switches and adjusting dials, blowing invisible dust off the record with French-maid fastidiousness, delicately plucking up the tone arm, catching it the way one might pick up a small but outraged serpent, with two fingers just at the base of the skull, gingerly almost to the point of reverence, and a moment later the room is filled with the exquisitely melancholic strains of Dolly Parton’s mourning-dove-with-a-broken-wing voice, keening:

In this mental insti-too-shun,
Looking out through these iron bars…

It’s her beautiful “Daddy, Come and Get Me,” about a girl whose husband has had her committed (“to get me out of his way”), and when Dolly comes to the lines “It’s not my mind that’s broken / It’s my heart,” Jerry Garcia, standing limned in soft morning sunlight before the arched front window, turns to me and—remember now, this is the Jerry Garcia, Captain Trips himself, the same Jerry Garcia who only twelve hours earlier utterly blew out three thousand of the most jaded, dope-devastated heads ever assembled even at the Fillmore (Dead fans are notorious in that regard)—that Jerry Garcia turns to me and clasps his hands to his breast and rolls his eyes after the goofy, gaga fashion of a lovesick swain and utters an ecstatic little moan and swoons into the nearest chair… and for the next half hour, while our breakfast turns cold in the kitchen, he and Hunter and I sit there in the living room tokin’ on a taste of Captain Trips’s morning pipe and groovin’ on Sweet Dolly’s bucolic threnodies about lost loves and dying lovers and stillborn babes, and by the time her last words (“O Robert! O Robert!”) fade into silence, there’s not a dry eye in the room…

https://www.thestacksreader.com/grateful-dead-i-have-known/

Tomorrow is Forever - Dead, Winterland Oct 19, 1974.   Dolly cover; 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FJMwAmV7vY

RIP to one of the kindest souls in the biz

Back in the 90's i was working at the Sunrise Musical Theater and i was touching up focus of the lights, which meant i was crawling across the truss over the stage,  during her sound check, and she looks up and says ' oh my there is a big ole long haired rat in the grid ' and i said ' you calling me a rat ' and she laughed and when i was down on the stage later she says ' oh, you are a big ole long haired rat, but your cute '...

what a treat to have that little interaction 

A beautiful lady.

She is missed.

What a gal  

That photo strikes a chord for me, as for some years now I saw Miley as the next Dolly. 

She was one of a kind.  Hope to hear a few tributes to her come Friday at the Outlaw festival. 

She had been missing a few appearances lately, so not too big a surprise.

I find it difficult to be too sad about this, as it's hard to imagine anyone living a better life than she did, and given her positive outlook on things I'd guess that she was OK/at peace with her end as well.

Good job Dolly.

On it goes.

Much like Tommy John a few weeks ago, I took the "health update" she offered last week as a goodbye so def not surprised 

Idk who it was that said:

"In a world full of Rhinestones she was a Diamond ".

I think that says it well. 

To paraphrase the Jackie Chiles character from Seinfeld, she was real and she was spectacular!

She held her old music partner Porter Wagoner's hand as he was dying.  With her husband predeceasing her, wonder who was there for her?  Loved her two Bluegrass records, The Grass Is Blue and Little Sparrow.  Think I'll go fire one of those up,

R.I.P. and thank you.

When Porter was down and out Dolly bought his entire catalog. Years later he tried to buy it back from her, and she returned his rights for free. 

Nice story, Dise. John Prine did the same thing for Todd Snider, just gave him back his rights.

This sucks, but it's been great that a certain someone has been pretty much knocked off the news today. 

We've been treated to stories about love and joy and generosity. People feel good about remembering Dolly. It's brought us together. Even in death, she did us good.   

Keep in mind that this also happened after he filed a lawsuit against her for leaving their show

Thanks for the album recs, Herbal!

Yep they sure did take the wrong 80yr old: RIP Tim Curry.

Fingers crossed on #3....

Looks like Dolly might be making a comeback.   Curious what happens next...

Dolly does her top ten peeves on David Letterman 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvaeUINhjQo