27/08/2026
Dolly Parton died on Tuesday. 80 years old, at home in Nashville. đź’”
Everybody’s sharing their favourite quotes -this is the one I’d pick ⬇️
“If you don’t like the road you’re walking, start paving another one.”
She wasn’t being poetic.
Her husband ran an asphalt paving business, so she’d watched a man do it for a living and knew exactly what the job involved.
She wrote “I Will Always Love You” in 1974 about leaving the television show that had made her famous. Elvis wanted to record it 🎤 which for a young country singer in 1974 was about as big as it got. Then his manager rang and said Elvis would only do it if she signed over half the publishing. She said no, and cried the whole way home.
Eighteen years later Whitney Houston sang it, sold 45 million copies, and because Dolly had held onto every word of it she earned around $20 million from the decision that had felt like the worst one she’d ever made.
Then she just kept laying tarmac. Dollywood in 1986 with her own advisers telling her it was a mistake, and it became the biggest employer in that corner of Tennessee.
Five hundred dollars to every kid in her county who finished school, and the dropout rate fell from 35% to 6%.
The Imagination Library because her daddy never learned to read, and over 300 million books posted out to children since 📚
A thousand a month to every family who lost their home in the 2016 wildfires.
A million into research at Vanderbilt that funded the early work behind the 🦠vaccine, then she queued up for hers like everybody else because she didn’t want it looking like she’d jumped the line.
She was told no on nearly all of it.
And most of that wasn’t a young woman finding her feet.
She played Glastonbury at 68 and pulled the biggest crowd of the weekend.
She funded the vaccine research at 74. At 76 she turned down the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame because she didn’t think she’d earned a place in it, so they inducted her anyway and she went off and made a rock album to deserve it, which turned out to be the highest charting solo record of her life.
She had a Broadway show and a hotel in progress when she died on Tuesday.
Which is where it stops being about Dolly 🦋
Because the road you’re walking now, you mostly didn’t sit down and choose.
Somebody else’s job took priority. Somebody needed collecting. Somebody’s mum got ill.
Twenty-odd years went by with you holding the whole thing together, and nobody ever asked whether the road still suited you, and you didn’t ask either, because there wasn’t a spare hour in the week to think about it.
And now the answer turns up before the question does.
Too late.
Too tired.
Too much else on.
This is just what happens at this age.
Nobody has to say that to you.
You might have said it to yourself already this week.
Paving is slow and it’s boring and you do it while you’re still walking the old road, because there’s no clear month coming where you get to stop and build⬇️
Dolly was still building at 80 ✌️
Dee
PS -what’s your favourite Dolly quote and why? 🎤⬇️