Two days on, the strangest thing has happened to my corner of the internet. LinkedIn feels like Dollywood. People who normally post about pipeline and quarterly targets are sharing her one-liners. Her quotes are everywhere, her songs are everywhere, and my feed, a place I usually endure rather than enjoy, has become the most joyous room on the internet. Even her exit is generous.
I’m not going to pretend to be measured about any of this. I’m devastated, and I’ve been a little surprised by how much.
The quotes are being shared because they hold up. She spent sixty years saying obvious things so fearlessly that they stopped sounding obvious. When the world mocked the wigs, the nails, the body, she got to the joke first:
“It costs a lot of money to look this cheap.” She made the punchline before anyone else could, then banked the difference.
Underneath the sequins sat one of the sharpest operators music has ever produced.
In 1974 Elvis Presley wanted to record “I Will Always Love You”. Dolly was thrilled. Of course she was. This was Elvis. Then, the night before the session, his manager called with the terms: Elvis didn’t record a song without taking at least half the publishing.
She cried all night. In the morning, she said no.
Not to Elvis. To the terms.
Eighteen years later, Whitney Houston sang that song into one of the biggest records ever made, and every royalty flowed home to a girl from a one-room cabin in the Smoky Mountains. One of twelve children. Left for Nashville the day after she finished high school, carrying a cardboard suitcase. The song still belonged to her.
Attention is lovely. Ownership is power.
You could call it luck that the song came back around. Except Whitney could only make Dolly rich because Dolly had refused, eighteen years earlier, to make Elvis richer. She wrote her own insurance policy in the same writing session she wrote “Jolene”, and it paid out for the rest of her life.
I doubt she’d ever have called herself a businesswoman. She simply understood her worth, priced it accordingly, and smiled while she did it.
What she did with the winnings is what makes her a legend. The Imagination Library has put more than 300 million books into the hands of children who, like her, might otherwise never have owned one. A $1 million cheque to Vanderbilt in 2020 helped fund the research behind Moderna’s early vaccine trial. This week Eminem shared the letter she wrote him after his Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction, telling him rap wasn’t her world but she could tell he was the very best at it. She had nothing to gain from that letter. That was rather the point of her. She collaborated her whole career, Kenny Rogers to Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter, because she knew joining up beats going it alone when you’re not scared of sharing the credit.
She never slowed down and she never went into the shadows. She defied every piece of nonsense ever written about age-appropriate dressing, and she did it while an entire industry waited for her to become a nostalgia act. What makes me saddest is that even at 80, having dominated the world with her talent, some of it was still a battle. She was still fielding questions about her body, her look, her right to be exactly herself.
She just never let us see the cost. She’s one of the people I credit for my own love of sequins, and for the nerve to become more myself as I’ve got older, not less.
It matters this week more than most. We’re living through AI bots screening women out of interviews, ageism dressed up as culture fit, and a technology industry of identically dressed men explaining the future in beige. Dolly wore exactly what she wanted, built more than most of them ever will, and stayed kind the entire time.
Let’s all be more Dolly, please.
If you want to honour her with more than a repost, steal three of her decisions.
Own the asset. Keep the thing you made, especially when someone famous asks nicely for half of it.
Build the world around it. She didn’t license her name to somebody else’s theme park. She became an owner, in the county where she grew up with nothing, and thousands of jobs grew around her.
Make success useful. The songs funded the park. The park funded the books. The fame carried the vaccine cheque. Nothing she built ever sat in a trophy cabinet.
She wasn’t an icon to me. Icons sit still. She was a hero, and heroes leave you instructions.
So I’m picking up the mantle the only way I know how. Sprucing up my sequins. Shining a bit brighter. Encouraging every brilliant woman I know to do the same.
Rest in sequins, Dolly. The world’s lost a lot of sparkle this week. Keeping the sequins moving is our job now.
If this made you think of a woman who’s been told she’s too much, forward it to her.
Nish x 🪩
I’m Nishma, and I help people get Switched ON to AI. Less overwhelm, more time and freedom, and a brand that stays unmistakably yours. If you’re midlife, brilliant, and tired of being told you’ve missed it, you’re exactly who I do this for. Come and find out more at nishma.co.
She is the best of us