‘Everything she did was for other people’ – fans in Nashville pay tributepublished at 03:56 BST
Helena Humphrey
Reporting from Nashville
Jenna Bailey, from Piney Flats, Tennessee
Outside the Country Music Hall of Fame here in Nashville, people are gathering tonight to remember the queen of country music. Among them is seven-year-old Nash Greer, standing beside Dolly Parton’s star, playing a moving rendition of Coat of Many Colors on his violin.
His mum tells me they were on their way home from school when they heard the news. Nash happened to have his “fiddle” in the car and asked if they could come straight down because he loved Dolly so much.
Around him, people are laying flowers and lighting candles. Some are in well-worn cowboy boots, others in rather flashier rhinestone ones.
Of course, Jolene and 9 to 5 are among the songs Dolly Parton is best known for. But what I keep hearing here tonight is how much Coat of Many Colors means to people, her song about growing up poor in rural Tennessee.
And that story of where she came from seems to be part of why people here feel such affection for her. Again and again, they talk about what she did for other people.
Jenna Bailey, from Piney Flats, Tennessee, tells me her two children received books from Parton’s Imagination Library from the time they were babies until they turned five.
“We still have all the books,” she says. “Everything she did was for other people.”
Lavender Davidson puts it another way: “She should have been a billionaire, but she just kept giving money away, because that’s what it was for.”
She calls Parton “the crown jewel of this state” and the “patron saint of the Appalachians”.
And I think that gets at something you really feel here tonight. In a country that can often seem deeply divided, Dolly Parton was one of those rare people who brought people together, across generations, backgrounds and politics.
Nash Greer, 7, honours Dolly Parton.
