26/08/2026
I am what you might call a quiet kind of fan.
Not the type who travels halfway across the world for a concert, or watches in awe while their idol signs a T-shirt. And yet, I cried last night, when I heard that she'd died.
And not just because I was a fan of hers.
Ours was a late connection.
For a long time, I admit, I only saw the surface and judged her by it. The huge hair, the lashes, the breasts, the perfectly constructed look. I took no time or had a particular desire to discover the artist behind all that. I did know that she was a great singer, performer, songwriter and human being, but I left it at that.
Then one day my Husband showed me a song of hers that is known by far less many people know around here.
And the song struck like lightning, love at first hearing.
It was the Coat of Many Colors.
The story she sings is about a little girl growing up in a very poor family. As the cold days of Fall approach, her mother sews her a coat out of scraps of rags. The girl is incredibly proud of it. The other children at school laugh at her, but she simply doesn’t understand why. She believes she has been given something enormously precious: all the love her mother put into every little stitch.
The song’s final thought is simple: you are only as poor or as rich as you believe yourself to be.
It wasn’t a new idea to me, yet, somehow it got to me. I started reading about the song, the artist, and soon discovered that this woman, who would later give millions to charity, really had grown up that poor. The song was, in fact, a lyrical record of her own childhood.
That was when I started looking behind the wigs and the false eyelashes.
One song led to another, one story to another, and eventually I became a quiet fan.
And last night I learned that she - the woman everyone somehow thought would always be there, because Dolly would always be around - was gone. Followed her beloved husband just a short year after his passing.
I’ve been listening to her songs and looking at her photographs, thinking about what kind of portrait series I might have made with her.
How much would I have wanted to convince her that she was beautiful even beyond that carefully crafted public image. That the old tattoos on the arm she didn’t like didn’t make her any less beautiful. That her makeup didn’t have to be perfect down to the tiniest detail to show her real glow.
But perhaps I wouldn’t have tried to convince her of any of that.
Because I’m beginning to think there was nothing for her to take off.
The stage and Dolly were one and united.
There wasn’t a Dolly on stage and another, “real” Dolly somewhere underneath it all. The hair, the makeup, the lashes, the clothes, the whole painstakingly created image didn’t hide her.
She was - it.
She created it. She built it. She wore it.
And all the while, she remained completely herself.
She would never have agreed to strip away the stage lights and show me her “real” face. And perhaps that is exactly what would have made photographing her so fascinating.
Because I have never seen anyone who was so completely herself in what other people saw as a mask.
“Authentic” doesn’t quite cover it.
Dolly was fiercely, almost stubbornly, loyal to herself.
She knew why she created the mask. She knew why she wore it. And somehow, through all of it and underneath all of it, she remained the same person.
How do we know?
From her songs. From her words. From the way she showed up for the world.
She never went anywhere without the image she had created for herself.
And yet she remained that same good-hearted, deeply lovable little girl who was proud of her coat of many colors because her mother had sewn it for her with love.
RIP Dolly Parton
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source of images: pinterest
