Dolly Parton died. You’ve heard about it at this point. You’ve also probably read about it at this point. 

I decided after Mike Davis died I was done writing obituaries. Once you meet someone who means a lot to you and they die, the enterprise to write the best obituary, to get it shared on social media, to let people know, “By the way, we talked once” started to disgust me, like an insurance salesman bringing up the back of the funeral.

I also grappled with it because while I find the memeticization of someone who was a singular talent distasteful, they do that to everyone now. My dislike of putting Dolly Parton in the Wholesome 100 Keanu section of celebrity had to do with the fact it became less about the talent and more about projecting some idea of toothless acceptability onto her. Icons don’t bleed or sweat; they stare at you, until you stare back as they melt into abstraction.

To me, given where she came from, a toothless and bloodless existence seemed like a disservice. Her music was a sharp observation of mountain femininity, its contours often getting missed when flattened into Mammaws and Meemaws and Struggling Moms. Being a woman in Appalachia requires you to understand how to survive, but there’s more to life than survival. My single favorite Dolly Parton song is “Travelin’ Man’, which is basically a song about a young girl who wants to sleep with a traveling salesman. Lo and behold, in the final verse, she sees her going up the road with her beau, the Travelin’ Man, at least until he travels again. That’s more interesting to me than cornering someone at a party with bloodshot eyes and sambuca on your breath and going “Dolly Parton could have written Das Kapital but Karl Marx couldn’t have written 9 to 5!” 

Speaking of Karl: in the great death content rush, an essay of mine called “How to Talk About Dolly Parton” was reposted by a magazine I used to be an editor/writer for. I talked frankly about how celebrity seems to work in this country, and how people have a hard time divorcing their appreciation of a celebrity from their views. In other words, the likelihood Dolly Parton is actually an epic socialist is pretty low, and in order to understand what one of these byproducts of the spectacle culture we find ourselves in is, we have to understand why the myth is attractive, even to people who ostensibly hate celebrities (never mind turning a real person into Gritty puts a bad taste in my mouth). This is all pretty dispassionate and abstract stuff, and Dolly’s celebrity was a case study for me. I zeroed in on a contradiction: Dolly Parton grew up in Pigeon Forge in a blue collar family, but the equivalent today is probably the kid of someone working at Dollywood. What do we do with that? You can talk about these things without saying you need to string somebody up. 

What I haven’t mentioned about this is that it was written four years ago, when my relationship with this publisher was alive, as was Dolly Parton. It was written in the way somebody might write about Elvis, to the point that “Dolly Parton” and Dolly Parton are two different people, and these things exist in one space that allows for a lot of contradictory impulses that are bound up in one person. Not only was that not made clear, there was no mention it was written by a past contributor on Instagram (in this case maybe a blessing). People would have been able to piece it together if the link was posted correctly. Instead, with each comment of “I can’t see the link” (it may have been shared as a reel), they had to drop it in the comments section. 

This magazine got roundly yelled at, which means, in a way, I did. And for good reason, as only the section with my contradictory point that the mom of today’s Dolly Parton works at Dollywood was shared. The piece I wrote about probably the most famous Appalachian person to ever exist, somebody who’s cultural world defined so much of mine, got boiled down to an inflammatory paragraph. Something I spent probably a month and a half writing and researching got used as a piece of bait for the dullards who rove Instagram ready to get into fights. 

I’m not stupid. It was posted because it would piss people off, which would get them to argue in the comments section, which would get views. I signed no contract, and any proprietor of any website is free to repost my work once I turn it over.

This doesn’t mean I have to like it, and that lets me respond in kind. 

I’d be happy to chalk this up to business as usual. But while my original reason for leaving was said to be health and family reasons, that’s not true. In the months leading up, I had gotten sick and tired of our only engagement strategy being outrage bullshit. Because this was a political project, there were disagreements there, but there is also good sense in how you run a magazine. The problem was when one person on a project gets a greenlight to do whatever they want because they started a project, yet operate it under the guise of equal discussion. 

The same editor who posted my Dolly Parton piece was the same editor I watched publish whatever he wanted without any internal discussion, most of which was designed under the exact same framework of constant contrarianism. One speed: polemic. The result usually was getting in useless Instagram comments section fights. This is the same editor who used AI art before speaking to any of us about it, the same one who went on a screed about how students were a distraction from real politics when I was writing a bird’s eye view of VCU after a protest during a particularly ludicrous pro-life group visit was broken up by the VCU police. It wasn’t a year later those same police clubbed and gassed students during a peaceful Palestine encampment (I was out after the VCU Final Four loss, taking in the scenes. I didn’t see anybody get clubbed, and they were breaking windows). Maybe I should have argued more; I was the newest edition to the editorial board, though, and didn’t feel like my say had much water to it. 

But they’re happy to use my work for clickbait. They’re happy to use my work as a shovel to put dirt on a woman’s grave, when my own thoughts are more complicated than Instagram dander. Given I was made to look like the guy who was waiting for to croak so I could point out “Have you considered she was a capitalist”, something that to me is like pointing out there are clouds in the sky, I think people need to understand what my critical work is for and what it’s not, given its misuse. 

First, if you’re mad at me for pointing out the extremely obvious, I have no sympathy for you. You can point to the charitable work and the acts of generosity, but under a system where charity is a tax write-off, you have to stand back and be cold blooded in evaluating how a system works. That system we call capitalism is the mode of production in this country and globally, and it produces capitalists of all stripes, even well-meaning and generous ones. I didn’t write this to tell you we need to kill her. You brought your own feelings to the party. Furthermore, Dolly Parton had had more money than that entire comments section combined will ever see. You can be mad about the timing but the people who earnestly argued I did some sort of awful thing by bringing this up four years ago can kiss my ass. I can hold two thoughts in my head at once, which apparently is in short supply these days. 

Second, I wrote this as a regional work. I’m Appalachian, not the kind of Appalachian you bandy about to get points amongst easily impressed people who can’t log off. I’m not going to pull out my credentials, but I am going to point out the Appalachian transition from an industrial economy into a service one has caused a psychic change in how work is viewed in the region. If you work a service job in this country, the people who want you to service them want you to have zero autonomy or humanity. Customers see customer service workers and see a husk that’s supposed to put the fries in the bag. That has real effects on people. Industrial work, for all its problems, had an end project that you could be proud of. Service work puts all the hard work on servicing people who don’t see you as a real person, some of whom are your neighbors. I don’t know if there’s a “better”, but I can tell you my grandfather was a welder for a coal company for many years, and he built a house. Try doing that on call center wages if you’re not a department head… or if you work at a theme park. I’ve forgotten more about the region than you can learn from a fucking Instagram page.

What that means is this: Dolly Parton was contradictory, like you and I both are. It is entirely possible for her to be the person who wrote “Coat of Many Colors” and someone whose investments and businesses lead to someone else having to make that very coat. She both exemplified the hard work in the region, and she made money off the hard work of others. Someone’s relation to political economy is not the entirety of their being, and in order to really talk about someone who has such a towering influence in American culture, you have to be somewhat comfortable dealing with messy complexities. The art is extremely valuable, which makes it all together more difficult. 

Third, and most importantly: the difference between me and that editor is I have better things to do than write bait. That tactic distracted from useful work, like journalism on trailer park management companies ignoring their tenants or interviewing striking workers at a call center, so it goes quadruple. Why I write criticism is to force myself to understand the world more: how art and commerce go hand in hand, how someone has the capacity to make music about poverty and how their investments don’t alleviate it and how we still love them despite those things not summing up in one easy way. I’m not farting in a proverbial elevator. 

I also view these works as literary (this might be viewed as bourgeois by the vulgates, but calling everything bourgeois is all they have). Each piece is contained in itself in how it connects to the broader discussion, but how the piece reads, what is brought up and what is not, is to service its standing existence as something you could read four or five years later. I didn’t write this under the knowledge that one day she would die and it’d be used as thirsty, clickbait shit.

If you encountered it that way, I don’t owe you an apology; you should charge your school for not giving you a good enough education in contextual reading. I also think my work got used in a simplistic, cynical way, and I will always comment when that happens. 

As for me and Dolly: her passing just stood to remind me a world I grew up in dying slowly, and it’ll keep going until I, too, go and am rested on that mountain. Hopefully I’m celebrated even one percent as much as Dolly was, though it seems impossible. Maybe when they lay me down for the final time, someone will be there to tell everyone everything I did wrong.