Dolly Parton is known as an award-winning performer/songwriter, proto-feminist and successful businessperson. The COVID outbreak also revealed her to be a public health philanthropist of the first order. Despite her fame and wealth, she never left the state of her birth and the people that love her. "People feel like they've known me so long because I've been around a long time," Parton told Southern Living magazine in 2014. "I'm really like an aunt or a cousin or a person you've grown up with—like somebody in the family. So I think they feel comfortable with me. I really think that is Southern hospitality." This is also why she should run for Governor against the current Establishment.
A part of Dolly Parton’s Southern hospitality involves remaining studiously apolitical. That has served her well, as her fanbase is solidly southern Republican (but also the young and hip). Parton was awarded the Presidential Medial of Freedom — America’s highest civilian honor — twice, and turned it down as many times. “I couldn’t accept it because my husband was ill, and then they asked me again about it, and I wouldn’t travel because of the Covid,” Parton told the Today Show. Then-President Trump happened to have been the one issuing the medal at the time. President Obama has since issued regrets that he never awarded her the medal and has said he would recommend her to now-President Biden. Parton, artfully apolitical, demurs, “now if I take it I will feel like I am doing politics, so I am not sure.”
But Dolly, at 75, should reconsider that apoliticality. Although she grew up poor, she is poor no longer. She has sold over a hundred million records, wrote over 3,000 songs and was the highest paid woman country music singer in the world as recently as 2017, according to Forbes. Dollywood Parks and Resorts creates jobs in Tennessee and is considered one of the top ten tourist attractions of the state. It is quite possible for Dolly to convey that Southern hospitality while also bringing “the Volunteer State” more in sync with Tennessee families. Of late her message has been one of unity, more a secular-religious message than political. Parton already has a strong civic sense of “giving back.” Her Imagination Library, for example, gives free books to children, distributing over 900,000 books per month in the U.S. Imagine how much more she could do for early childhood education as Chief Executive of the state of Tennessee!
Her actual politics are not without some mystery. Although Parton, a Sevier County native, comes off as more Democrat than Republican, she has never officially endorsed a Presidential candidate. That, of course, is good for business and one of the reasons why she has been culturally relevant for over half a century. Born in a one-room cabin in the Smokey Mountains, Dolly, one of twelve children, performed on local radio and television by the time she was 10 years old. Like Johnny Cash, her songs have always sided with the lower and working classes against the abuses of the arrogant and out-of-touch overclass. And in an interview with Billboard last year, at the height of the pandemic, she affirmed the Black lives Matter movement. “I understand people having to make themselves known and felt and seen,” she told the magazine. “And of course Black lives matter. Do we think our little white asses are the only ones that matter? No!”
A Governor Dolly Parton could almost certainly make life better for thousands of her left behind constituents. Incumbent Tennessee Republican Governor Bill Lee has a solidly anti-LGBT agenda. Parton has precisely the opposite view, but she expresses those views in a down-home manner in a way that generally eludes most Democrat candidates campaigning south of the Mason-Dixon line. "Why can't they be as miserable as us heterosexuals in their marriages?" she joked with Australian News Breakfast from Nashville. "Hey, I think love is love and we have no control over that … I think people should be allowed to [marry]," she continued. One could almost imagine such a line, delivered on the campaign trail, gaining traction in the Smokey Mountains.
Dolly Parton, of course, is not politically correct. Her style, she has famously said, was inspired by the “town tramp.” She has more than a passing familiarity with guns, and has been known to pull them on men who get too frisky with her. She is feminist, after a fashion, but certainly not an urban ivy feminist.
A Dolly Parton candidacy would have an automatic organic credibility in Tennessee. Beyond her longtime as a celebrity resident, Dollywood generates tens of millions of dollars in state and local taxes every year. Whether as an Independent or as a Democrat, Dolly has been a part of the landscape of Country music for so long that even the reddest of red state voters would at the very least give her candidacy a courtesy listen.
The 2022 Tennessee gubernatorial election will take place in November 2022. Wouldn’t it be a wonderful thing if Dolly Parton was on the ballot next year — whether as a Democrat or even as an Independent — against the current incumbent Bill Lee, who did not even acknowledge that Joe Biden had had won the Presidency until January of 2020.