Musings, Meanderings, & Loops · Essay
August 26, 2026
My father kept his 45s in a shaggy carrying case that looked like a small animal, and one of the records he prized most was "Here You Come Again." He had everything — Led Zeppelin to Neil Sedaka — and no ideology about any of it; what he had was an ear. He could hear when a pop song was built right, whoever built it, whatever bin it was filed in. "Laughter in the Rain." "Smoke from a Distant Fire." And a Dolly Parton single written by two Brill Building pros, which he considered close to a perfect record.
That case is where I came in. So when the news arrived Tuesday that Dolly Parton had died in Nashville at eighty, I found myself thinking less about the catalog than about a question I have been circling from other directions for weeks: what, exactly, was she doing that nobody else could do?
Because the obituaries all gesture at the same remarkable fact. She was openly, warmly supportive of her gay fans, and there was scarcely a Republican in Congress who did not love her. She was a devout Christian from the Smoky Mountains, and drag queens built acts around her with her blessing. In the most sorted era in American life, she remained unsorted — and beloved across every line the rest of the culture treats as a wall.
The easy version of this says she was kind, and everyone could feel it. That is true and it explains nothing. Plenty of kind people get torn apart. The interesting question is mechanical: how does a person hold the middle of a battlefield for fifty years without being claimed by either army or shot by both?
Start with the objection, because it deserves its full strength. The charge is familiar: the middle is a hiding place. Neutrality, the argument runs, is what self-interest looks like once it acquires good manners — and it is true that some entertainers have discovered a deep commitment to staying above politics at the exact moment conviction got expensive. If we are going to praise Dolly for sitting in the middle, we owe that argument an answer: how do we know her middle was not that one?
Here is the test case. At the 2017 Emmys, the 9 to 5 trio reunited to present an award — Dolly between Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin, the reunion she said she had been looking forward to. Her co-stars had planned something she had not: Fonda recalled that in 1980 they had refused to be controlled by a "sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot," and Tomlin landed the update — in 2017, they still refused. The room roared. The line was aimed at the sitting president, and Dolly was standing in the crossfire of it on live television.
She made a joke about her chest.
For this she was criticized from the left — silence is complicity, she had a platform and ducked — and from the right, which wanted to know why she stood there while her friends did that. Asked about it afterward, her answer was characteristic: they are entitled to their opinions, and "I don't voice my political opinions. I just get out there and entertain."
Both sides fired at her that week. That is worth pausing on, because it is the signature of an actual middle rather than a hiding place. The person hiding offends no one; that is the point of hiding. Dolly managed to disappoint both armies at once, repeatedly, for decades, and neither one ever quite gave up on her. You do not get that by being empty. You get it by being full of things that do not sort.
Because here is what the fence-sitter theory cannot explain: Dolly had positions. She had more of them than most of the people demanding she pick a side.
She was seriously, publicly Christian — gospel roots, faith talked about without embarrassment in rooms where faith is treated as a rural accent to be trained away. That position had a cost, and the cost was paid in coastal currency. She was seriously, publicly loving toward her gay fans — not with a lawyer's carefully worded statement but with open arms, decade after decade, in front of audiences that were not ready for it. That position had a cost too, paid in Nashville currency. She sang about the dignity of working people to rooms full of the bosses. She kept her faith in front of the skeptics and kept her arms open in front of the church.
A fence-sitter avoids cost by holding nothing. Dolly held extra — a double load, each conviction priced in the other tribe's money. What she refused was never the positions. It was the bundle.
That is the actual demand of the culture war, when you strip it down. Not that you believe things — that you believe them in the approved sets, so that your view on one question predicts your view on every other, and strangers can read a single opinion and know which army you belong to. Dolly declined the packaging. Faith did not come bundled with judgment. Loving gay people did not come bundled with leaving the church. Working-class loyalty did not come bundled with a party registration. Every bundle that arrived, she opened, kept what she meant, and sent the rest back.
And when the armies tried to claim her anyway, she declined that too — symmetrically, which is the detail I keep returning to. She turned down the Presidential Medal of Freedom three times: twice from Donald Trump, once from Joe Biden. Her explanation for the last refusal was as clean a statement of the whole project as she ever gave: "I just don't want even the appearance of being partisan in any way." Both parties wanted her on the mantel. Neither got her. The refusals only mean something because there were two of them.
Which brings me back to my father's record, because "Here You Come Again" is not a digression from any of this. It is the same act, performed in vinyl.
In 1977 Dolly wanted the pop audience, and she cut a single written not in Nashville but by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, Brill Building royalty. Country purists heard the strings and the sheen and pronounced the betrayal: she was leaving. Her answer, which she repeated for years in one form or another, was that she was not leaving country music — she was taking it with her. The record went to the top of the country chart and into the pop top three simultaneously. It did not cross from one side to the other. It sat in the middle and was claimed by both.
My father, who could not have cared less about the genre politics, just heard a perfectly built record. I suspect that is roughly how a hundred million other people processed Dolly across fifty years — the arguments about which bin she belonged in raged somewhere overhead while the thing itself simply worked.
She did it again a decade later with Trio, the record my father also loved, made with Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris — two women from a different America than hers, geographically and politically. What makes that album work is what makes harmony work at all: the voices stay different. Three singers merged into one would be unison, and unison is thin. Harmony requires that each line keep its own identity while consenting to sound with the others. She spent a career doing musically what she did civically, and I do not think that is a coincidence. I think it was one skill.
I have been writing all month about holding opposing positions in tension — that the answer to a hard question is often to let both sides stand and refuse the cheap resolution, and that this does not have to be a suicide pact to moral seriousness. You can hold the tension and still render verdicts. It is a posture I believe in for essays.
Dolly Parton is what it looks like as a life.
Not a life without convictions — a life so thick with them that no army could carry her, held together by the one conviction underneath all the others: that the people on both sides of every line she straddled were her people, and she was not going to give any of them up to make the sorting easier. She kept the faith and kept the drag queens. She kept the mountains and kept the Brill Building. She turned down medals from both presidents and mailed a few hundred million books to children who will never know which party their benefactor voted for, because she made sure no one knows.
The seat she held is empty now, and it was nearly empty before she died — she may have been the last person in American life allowed to sit in it. I do not think the seat is coming back on its own. But the skill is learnable, and she spent eighty years demonstrating it in public: hold everything you actually believe, refuse the bundle, pay full price in both currencies, and make the thing so well built that people love it before they remember to check which side it came from.
My father never had to check. He just played the record.