On the day after she graduated high school, in 1964, Dolly Parton left her hometown of Locust Ridge, Tennessee, to head for Nashville, just over two hundred miles west and a world apart. Six years later she returned to her alma mater, Sevier County High School, to give a concert, which was recorded as her first live album, A Real Live Dolly. The event was also a fundraiser, inaugurating the Dolly Parton Scholarship Foundation, which was to fund local students’ college tuition and purchase musical equipment for the school’s band.

By then, at twenty-four, Parton had released five solo albums and four albums recorded with the country music impresario Porter Wagoner. She’d joined his nationally televised variety show in 1967, and they’d become one of the most popular country-singing duos in the US. By the standards of the music and television business, she wasn’t exactly rich (for the seven years she worked on Wagoner’s weekly television show, her salary was around $60,000 a year), but compared to the extreme poverty of her childhood, she was a huge success. She’d come home to spread the wealth. “The foundation is a project for which she has great plans,” the album’s liner notes promised. Like many people Parton knew growing up, her father could neither read nor write, so encouraging literacy and education as a path to economic stability was a cause close to her heart, the impetus for a lifetime of philanthropy that would economically transform the region. (Her theme park, Dollywood, opened in 1986, making Pigeon Forge a major tourist hub; her Imagination Library, started in 1996, has to date sent more than three million free books to children around the world, once a month from birth until they’re five years old.)

At the concert Dolly was introduced by a local radio host, Cas Walker, who’d been having her as a guest on his show since she was ten years old. She opened with the silly-sweet songs her audience might have remembered hearing when she was a kid, as well as her first hit in Nashville, “Dumb Blonde”—“Just because I’m blonde, don’t think I’m dumb/Cause this dumb blonde ain’t no-oo-body’s fool”—followed by a suite of duets with Wagoner and a gospel song dedicated to her parents. She also sang a couple of her solo songs, already marked by the clever pathos of her distinctive songwriting voice, including the understated feminist anthem “Just Because I’m a Woman” and the premiere of a song that she identified with for the rest of her life, “Coat of Many Colors.”

The song’s premise is simple: it’s getting cold and the narrator needs winter clothes. The family is poor, so her mother stitches together a coat from rags, relating the story of Joseph in the book of Genesis while she sews. But being singled out as special has its risks, because of course she’s teased at school—the other children know the true reason her coat is patchwork:

They didn’t understand it, and I tried to make them see
That one is only poor only if they choose to be.
Now I know we had no money, but I was rich as I could be
In my coat of many colors, my mama made for me.

The song captures much that defines Parton’s music: a preternatural dexterity with words as they are spoken; effortless rhymes and melodies that develop into complex narratives; a profound sense of identification with being different or looked down upon (whether as a woman or a poor person or a child or uneducated or a southerner); a commitment to a moral universe beyond materialism and money; and the belief that we make the world, other people, and ourselves beautiful and precious through love.

The vast outpouring of grief and tribute after Parton’s death at eighty late last month owes much to the fact that she was probably the kindest genius America ever had—all the more astonishing because her genius and her kindness were inextricable from each other. She was loved as deeply, and seemingly for the same reasons, on rodeo grounds and in gay bars, in rural towns and major cities, and across the extremes of the political spectrum. Her advocacy for loving the poor, welcoming the stranger, and bestowing generosity had its roots in her authentic, nondogmatic Christian faith, which over the decades put her at increasing odds with her country’s politicized Christianity and partisan polarization.

One has to imagine that whoever had laughed at Parton in elementary school was there in the packed auditorium that evening in Sevier County. The whole concert is a summary of her life’s story up to that moment, performed for those who knew her when. But it wasn’t like she was particularly comfortable there either, as she told an interviewer a few years later: “I never felt I belonged. Never belonged in my whole life, even as a little kid. I was just different and so I never really found my place till I moved to Nashville and got in the music business. That was my real place, so I fit in.” And like Joseph the Redeemer she returns; the coat of many colors, once an occasion for mockery, was in fact a blessing twice over, first as proof of her mother’s love and then as her art.

Growing up in rural east Tennessee provided a deep well of experience which Parton drew upon for thousands of songs. Small-town people know a lot about one another’s business, the best and the worst, and her songwriting reveals her to be a particularly sensitive observer. Throughout the Sixties she wrote a number of spooky ballads about young women who’d been loved and abandoned. “The Bridge” (1968) is told by a bereft woman recalling a failed romance, standing on the edge and overlooking a river: “From the bridge, I see reflections/in the waters far below.” “Here is where it started,” she sings, “and here is where I’ll end it,”at which point the song abruptly stops. In the aching “Down From Dover” (1970), another betrayed girl waiting for her faithless lover to return describes the seasons changing as her pregnancy comes to term: “The sun behind a cloud just casts a crawling shadow o’er the fields of clover/And time is running out for me, I wish that he would hurry down from Dover.” (He doesn’t—the baby is stillborn.)

Even when her tales are fully gothic—a malignant orphanage burned down by its charges in “Evening Shade” (1969) or a woman involuntarily admitted to a mental hospital by a sinister man in “Daddy Come and Get Me” (1970)—the predicaments and sorrows she describes are just a few degrees of intensity away from real life as it is lived all around her. When Parton writes about more quotidian scenes—a love triangle, a late romance, a middle-aged divorce—they’re emotionally subtle and resolutely adult, in a way that seems largely absent from contemporary music, pop, country, or otherwise.

Take what might seem to be the hyperbolic promise of the mega-hit “I Will Always Love You.” Both a “thank you” and a “goodbye” to Wagoner as Parton left his TV show and their collaboration in 1974, it is a break-up song disguised as a love song, and vice versa: “If I should stay/I would only be in your way/So I’ll go, but I know,/I’ll think of you each step of the way.” In the singing she attenuates the vowels—stay/way, know/go—which anticipates the melodic expansion between the “I” and “you” in the chorus, each word rhyming only with itself through repetition, as though the voice and feeling are enlarging to meet the growing space between the singer and her subject. Moreover, that ever-expanding “I” and “you” are the same note, the melody created by the four chords cycling beneath them—loves goes on forever, as the lovers go their separate ways. Formally, the song is so clean as to be transparent. Emotionally, it’s about neither severance nor celebration but the recognition that sometimes things just don’t work out. The song ends with a semi-spoken prayer: “I hope life/treats you kind,/and I hope that you have all you ever dreamed of/and I wish you joy and happiness/but above all of this I wish you love”—a sentiment bordering on cosmic empathy.

When Parton left Wagoner it was to pursue her solo career, which she thought could be much bigger than country music. It was a potentially treacherous transition, and she made it with aplomb. In 1977 she released her nineteenth solo album, Here You Come Again, explicitly aimed at the pop audience and propelled by the good-hearted intoxication of Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil’s title track—pure Brill Building bubblegum—which reached number 3 on the pop music charts. The second single, which also made the pop top 20, was Parton’s original, twangy, disco-inflected “Two Doors Down,” about getting over being sad and shy to find the fun that’s waiting for you (“because two doors down they’re laughing and drinking and having a party”). On the B-side, “It’s All Wrong, but It’s All Right,” about the pleasures of casual sex, she retains the emotional complexity and authenticity found in her country music:

Hello, are you free tonight?
I like your looks, I love your smile
Could I use you for a while?
It’s all wrong, but it’s all right.

She even keeps the high weirdness of her ghost ballads on “Me and Little Andy,” about a little girl and her puppy, abandoned by a mother and fleeing a drunk father, who take shelter from a storm with a good-natured stranger before the two die in their sleep; Parton sings parts of the dialogue in the child’s high voice. Perhaps most surprising, given the rest of the album, is “God’s Coloring Book,” a tender paean to a solitary communion with the divinity through nature—“Then I turn my face toward the sky/and say a silent prayer/Though God doesn’t speak to me/I see him everywhere.” In an album self-consciously engineered to introduce her to the mainstream, Parton demonstrated that she wasn’t leaving anything behind. The Appalachian Mountains, gospel, folk, disco, sex, God: in her music, it all exists in harmony.

Parton’s earliest appearances on the Porter Wagoner show capture her in Sixties country-girl drag with a blonde beehive and form-fitting shift dresses. Wagoner himself was known for a towering pompadour and outlandishly colored suits with sequins and rhinestones, a kind of country-western surrealism. Matching then outpacing him, Parton’s voluminous hair grew more sculptural, her outsized physical proportions accentuated with glittering costumes, her makeup heavier and brighter, until she arrived at an almost cartoon image of more-is-more femininity. The disparity between the high artifice of her appearance and the authenticity of her personality—not to mention the reality of her artistry—became a dialectic that drove the public’s fascination.

Look at Parton’s performance at the Grand Old Opry in 1969, featured in the documentary The Nashville Sound, stacked, spangled, playing her guitar, and singing a sad song about the boy she left back home: the faces in the audience are in utter disbelief, men’s mouths agog. All her career she used her appearance as a disarming joke, in control of the dazzle camouflage of gender, race, and class, often repeating her signature one-liner “it costs a lot of money to look this cheap.” As late as her 2008 country-pop album Backwoods Barbie, Parton was teasing out this dichotomy, playing, on the title song, the image of the infamous inanimate doll against the inner life of the real living person: “I’ve always been misunderstood because of how I look/Don’t judge me by the cover cause I’m a real good book/So read into it what you will, but see me as I am/The way I look is just a country girl’s idea of glam.” It’s a conceptual somersault: as astonishing as Parton’s appearance is, in fact because of its supreme construction, she is forever reminding us that when it comes to things that really matter, appearances have everything and almost nothing to do with it.

Riding this paradox of self and image, Parton catapulted to superstardom with her acting debut in the feminist blockbuster (another seeming oxymoron) 9 to 5 (1980), where she shares an intoxicating chemistry with her costars Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda. Parton is sweet and strong and funny and gorgeous as Doralee, a secretary dodging her boss’s advances with jokes until she can’t anymore—a character, like all her acting roles, that seemed to be an extension of “Dolly” the offscreen persona. She wrote the theme song, the famous typewriting-clacking opening conceived by rhythmically strumming her acrylic nails. The tune is so catchy, and by now so well known, it’s easy to forget how many words there are and how quickly they flow in the rush of getting to work:

Tumble out of bed and I stumble to the kitchen
Pour myself a cup of ambition
And yawn and stretch and try to come to life
Jump in the shower and the blood starts pumpin’
Out on the street, the traffic starts jumpin’
With folks like me on the job from nine to five.

The song served as the title track for a concept album released with the movie, 9 to 5 and Odd Jobs, that mixed original songs with a number of covers about labor, balancing the indignities of work against the pride of making a living, placing coal mining (“Dark as a Dungeon”) in the same category as sex work (“House of the Rising Sun”). A touching rendition of Woody Guthrie’s “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos),” about a plane crash that killed some thirty Mexican laborers as they were being deported (“Who are these dear friends all scattered like dry leaves?/The radio said, ‘they were just deportees’”), portrays a simple humanity that qualifies as “woke” by today’s standards. Her own synth-hymn “Working Girl” blends vignettes about everywomen, dressed in guises from a pushup bra to a power suit to a uniform: “She’s a working girl, she is single and free/She’s a mother and wife and she’s proud to be/A working girl.”Much like her crossover album, where the provocation of a young woman singing about her own sexual desire can rest alongside her reverence for God, a collection of songs that places the explicitly gendered labor of women on an equal footing with more familiar sites of class struggle, performed as the most lovable mainstream pop, would be recognized as radical if Parton didn’t make it seem like a simple, uncontroversial description of reality.

Through movies and songs like these and an ever-growing presence on talk shows and in other public appearances, she developed a diverse and die-hard audience, especially among women and queer people. Her public statements on rights for LBGTQ+ communities were clear and consistent, explicitly citing the Christian value of accepting everyone as they are. “Travelin’ Thru,” the theme song she wrote and performed for the film Transamerica (2005), situates the experience of being trans within the loving embrace of Christ: “God made me for a reason and nothin’ is in vain/Redemption comes in many shapes with many kinds of pain/Oh, sweet Jesus, if you’re listenin’, keep me ever close to you/As I’m stumblin’, tumblin’, wanderin’, as I’m travelin’ through.” When she sings in the chorus that the protagonist is “like a poor wayfarin’ stranger that they speak about in song,” she’s riffing on one of the most powerful entries in the American songbook, “Wayfaring Stranger,” a folk and gospel standard with origins in African American spirituals. Parton summons the musical and spiritual foundations of the country in support of a ballad about queer people living their lives as best as they can, like everyone else. (You can hear the almost chilling intensity of her feeling for “Wayfaring Stranger” when she sings it on her 1994 live concert album Heartsongs.)

As she aged her high bell-like soprano acquired a razor’s edge, while her technical skills as a writer and musician reached new levels of virtuosity, culminating in a trilogy of bluegrass albums: The Grass Is Blue (1999), Little Sparrow (2001), and Halos and Horns (2002). These efforts were a stripped-down, amped-up musical return to the sounds of her childhood, blending Appalachian folk music with bluegrass and gospel. Widely acclaimed, the first won her a Grammy for best bluegrass album. It further endeared her to exacting Americana audiences, with the reviewer in Country Music proclaiming, “Her rigorous attention to craft and articulation, deep blues sensibility and emotional range have few matches anywhere.” With this added richness to her voice she revisits ballads of her youth like “Down from Dover,” this time with the wisdom of an older woman, and writes new ones like “Little Sparrow,” about a woman who, crushed like a little bird by a false lover, turns the same bird into an image of vengeance and transcendence. Covers of popular songs are transformed into devotional music, from the alt-rock group Collective Soul’s “Shine” to a rendition of Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” where her voice crescendos into a psychedelic swirl of plucking banjos and gospel choir, adding her own lyrical riffs to the end: “Oh the great almighty dollar, leaves you lonely, lost, and hollow/You can’t fool yourself forever, you’ve got to work to get to heaven.”

Her sparkling rainbow-colored exterior was always an ingenious means of protection for a deep interiority. Despite the half-century of her fame, almost nothing is known about the nature of her long marriage or her closest friendships. She was acutely aware that she could take credit for her seemingly tireless work ethic but not for her extraordinary gifts, for which she was continuously grateful. This is the source of her deep goodness and flowing generosity. For her the space of creativity was itself the sacred, which is why she referred to the work of songwriting as entering the “god zone” or “spirit zone.” That place of communion required solitude yet was beyond the single self, a place to observe life in a kind of prayer. The purest portrait of who Dolly Parton was and what she valued as an artist and human being, from beginning to end, was already contained in a lyric she wrote in the early Sixties, before she even left home:

Words can’t describe what I feel inside
When I see the beauty in each coming day
What my eyes behold can’t be bought or sold
And everything’s beautiful in its own way.