How Dolly Parton’s Father’s Illiteracy Inspired Her Imagination Library

In the announcement of Dolly Parton’s passing at the age of 80, the country icon’s family shared a statement that emphasised how important her father’s influence was across her 8-decade career.

“Dolly was a farmer, just like her daddy,” Bryan Seaver, Parton’s nephew and head of security, said in the video announcing her passing. “He farmed the soil; she farmed songs and happiness.”

“Sadness lies with us, not with Dolly. Dolly has lived in the light and is in the arms of Jesus, surely met by Carl, her parents, and countless others who have watched her and longed for her to meet them in the heavens.”

It was Parton’s admiration for her beloved Daddy, Robert Lee Parton Sr., and her upbringing in poverty in rural Tennessee that motivated the star to create what was perhaps her proudest life achievement: Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, her charity that has given an estimated 300 million books to children since its launch in the 1980s.

The program, once a local effort in Parton’s home state, became a global initiative that gifts eligible children up to 60 free books from the ages of 5 until adulthood, to help improve educational inequality and encourage a lifelong love of reading.

“Daddy never had a chance to go to school, so he could never read or write,” Parton told Oprah Winfrey in 2020. “Daddy was a very smart man…but he was ashamed that he couldn’t read or write. That bothered him. He felt like he couldn’t learn after he was grown. I remember thinking, ‘I need to do something.'”

Thankfully, Robert lived long enough to see his daughter’s legacy of literacy across the world, before his death at the age of 79 in 2000. “My dad got to live long enough to see the Imagination Library doing well and the little kids calling me ‘The Book Lady.’ He got such a kick out of that,” she continued.

“I always know he’s up there somewhere thinking, ‘You go girl. You done good.'”