Dolly Parton: Outside the Music

In the wake of Dolly Parton’s passing on August 25, tributes and remembrances have flowed steadily across every form of media. While a goodly portion of the hosannas related to the more than 3,000 songs that she wrote or co-wrote, much has been made of her activities outside of music. Not only was Parton a champion of those less fortunate, she had an eye for other entertainment. Here are five significant examples of Dolly the producer, the philanthropist, and the humanitarian.

5. Dolly the Vampire Producer

Though Dolly Parton would operate or partner in more than one TV and film production venture, the most well-known was Sandollar Productions. Sandollar was co-founded by Parton’s one-time manager Sandy Gallin and Parton. Among the films produced by the company were the Steve Martin/Diane Keaton-starring Father of the Bride movies. Sandollar also produced the Academy Award-winning documentary Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt.

But perhaps the project that spawned the longest legacy in entertainment began when writer Joss Whedon sold Sandollar the rights to his screenplay, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The film wasn’t a massive success, though it did earn twice its budget and achieve cult status after its 1992 release. Five years later, Whedon relaunched the concept on the nascent WB network as a weekly TV series. Sandollar was a key production partner in the show and its spin-off, Angel. While Parton maintained more of a “silent partner” role while the series were on air, she sent letters and Christmas presents to the cast and praised the show and its star, Sarah Michelle Gellar, in interviews. Buffy ran for seven seasons and Angel for five, turning out a combined 234 episodes of television. Gellar and others developed a reboot of Buffy in the past couple of years, but partner Hulu passed on it; however, the character may yet return, given the show’s still-fervent following.

4. Welcome to Dollywood

While there are theme parks all over America, there are very few that you associate with one person’s name. Disney, obviously, and Knott’s Berry Farm come to mind, but Dolly was someone who the whole world knew by her first name, and that name was applied to her amusement venture at the foot of The Great Smoky Mountains. The park was founded by the Robbins brothers as Rebel Railroad in 1961. As ownership changed hands several times, it was alternately known as Goldrush Junction, Goldrush, and Silver Dollar City.  In 1986, Parton bought in and the park was rebranded as Dollywood.

Between 1986 and 2010, the park doubled in size. In 2001, a companion water park, Dollywood’s Splash Park, was added next to the original location. The parks combined cover over 200 acres. The brand and Parton’s other Pigeon Forge-area properties employ around 11,000 workers. Those workers have access to Grow U, which covers tuition, fees, and books at 100 percent for high school equivalency or higher education starting on each employee’s first day. The Dollywood Family Health Center serves workers on the property with discounted, or even free, services. And every worker eats for free on their shift and has access to childcare assistance (via specified providers).

3. The Whitney Connection

“I Will Always Love You” as performed by Whitney Houston (Uploaded to YouTube by Whitney Houston)

Dolly Parton was the first person to take the same song to the top of the country charts twice. She did with “I Will Always Love You;” it hit #1 in 1974, and again in 1982 with a re-recorded version from the soundtrack of her musical-comedy film, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. But the song went through the stratosphere when Whitney Houston covered it for The Bodyguard in 1992. Parked at #1 for 14 weeks (a record at the time), it became the best-selling single by a woman in the United States ever to that point.

As the writer of the song, Parton made a huge amount of additional money from Houston’s version; she took in more than $10 million from its success. But Dolly being Dolly, she put that money into a strip mall and office complex in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Nashville, Tennessee. Parton thought it was an appropriate way to honor Houston, by improving a community in need of further resources. As Parton told host Andy Cohen on Watch What Happens Live, “I just thought, ‘This was great. I’m going to be down here with her people, who are my people as well.’ And so I just love the fact that I spent that money on a complex. And I think, ‘This is the house that Whitney built.'”

2. Literal Lifesaver

Dolly Parton gets first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine she helped fund (Uploaded to YouTube by KTLA 5)

As much as we’d like to forget it, we all remember the fear and uncertainty surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic that erupted in 2020. As teams raced to add to pre-existing research to develop a vaccine, Parton donated $1 million to Vanderbilt University Medical Center. The Center was on the frontlines of developing a vaccine with Moderna. According to Fortune, “Overall, more than 250 million people globally received the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine, while COVID vaccinations as a whole are estimated to have saved at least 14 million lives in the first year of their rollout alone.”

1. “The Book Lady”

Dolly Parton on her Imagination Library (Uploaded to YouTube by Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library)

In conjunction with her charitable Dollywood Foundation, Parton launched The Imagination Library in 1995. It started in Tennessee with the simple premise of distributing books to children. Today, that mission has expanded to, as the website puts it, “inspiring a love of reading by gifting books free of charge to children from birth to age five, through funding shared by Dolly Parton and local community partners in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia and Republic of Ireland.” Throughout the past 31 years, the program has gifted a staggering 300,000,000 million books; as of 2026, three million registered children receive books monthly. It is not uncommon for children who know Parton’s picture from mailings to identify her in person as “The Book Lady.” On The Strombo Show, Parton addressed the fact that kids knew her by that unofficial title and how much pride her father, who was functionally illiterate when Parton was young, took in his daughter’s program. When Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce made charitable donations on the occasion of their wedding this year, they allocated $2 million specifically for The Imagination Library.

While the tributes and deeply entrenched cultural mourning for Parton will continue for some time, so will her various legacies. Entertaining, educating, giving . . . Parton not only made herself a paragon of excellence, but also set an example for what the rest of us could, and should, be.