Dolly Parton, and the Column I Almost Didn't Write

Hello and welcome to Wednesday, Aug. 26, 2026 — dogs, toilet paper, and women's equality all sharing the calendar today, which is a genuinely strange trio to plan a day around.

My calendar says it's Dog Day, Women's Equality Day, Toilet Paper Day, Cherry Popsicle Day, and Sport Sampling Day. Hug a dog, restock the toilet paper before you actually need it, eat a cherry popsicle, and try a sport you've never touched before — women's equality gets the historical nod today, too, and it's earned it.

Today in History:
1498: Michelangelo is commissioned to carve the Pietà, the sculpture that now stands in St. Peter's Basilica in Vatican City.
1768: Captain James Cook sets sail from England aboard the HMS Endeavour on his first voyage of scientific exploration.
1791: John Fitch receives a U.S. patent for his working steamboat.
1883: The volcano Krakatoa erupts catastrophically in Indonesia, ultimately killing more than 36,000 people in one of the deadliest eruptions in recorded history.
1920: The 19th Amendment is officially certified, guaranteeing American women the right to vote nationwide, the very reason for today's Women's Equality Day.
1957: The Soviet Union announces the successful test of the world's first intercontinental ballistic missile.
1970: Fifty years after suffrage, feminist leader Betty Friedan spearheads a nationwide Women's Strike for Equality.
1978: Cardinal Albino Luciani is elected Pope John Paul I, though his papacy lasts just 33 days before his sudden death.
1980: John Birges plants a bomb at Harvey's Resort Hotel in Stateline, Nev., in an extortion attempt targeting the casino.
2003: NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope launches, beginning a mission to observe the universe in infrared light.

Birthdays Today include: Shirley Manson, singer-songwriter (Garbage); Macaulay Culkin, actor (Home Alone); Melissa McCarthy, actor-comedian (Bridesmaids, Tammy); Chris Pine, actor (Star Trek, Wonder Woman); Branford Marsalis, jazz saxophonist.

If today’s your day, too, have a great one.

* * *

Dolly Parton, in case you've somehow been under a rock for the last thirty-plus hours, is gone. Passed at 80. Cancer, according to the reports coming out now, and by all accounts it was mercifully brief.

I'll be straight with you: As a writer, this puts me in a genuine bind. Normally when I pick up a subject, whether it's ripped from today's headlines or some bigger idea I'm dragging current events into, it's because I think I've got an angle nobody else has bothered to touch. That's the whole game, as far as I'm concerned. That’s what I do here, every single day.

Trouble is, with literally everybody who owns a byline and an editor currently cranking out their own Dolly Parton tribute, I genuinely don't know what's left for me to add to the pile. The woman inspired that kind of universal affection. Tributes from Paul McCartney to J.K. Rowling to the cast of a 9 to 5 stage production in Worthing, England, stopping mid-show to dedicate the night's performance to her. When you've got that level of consensus, there's not exactly a contrarian angle sitting around waiting to be discovered.

So let me instead give you the one thing I actually can offer that most of today's tribute-writers can't: I worked in country radio for about five years, right in the thick of the Urban Cowboy craze. And that gives me a slightly different vantage point on Dolly than most of what you're going to read today.

See, my center of gravity in country music was never really Nashville. It sat somewhere between Austin and Bakersfield, occasionally stretching out to Muscle Shoals on one end and up into Northern California on the other — Poco, the Eagles, Linda Ronstadt, the Flying Burrito Brothers, plus a healthy dose of the homegrown Ohio scene, McGuffey Lane and that whole crowd. That was my country music.

Dolly Parton, meanwhile, was one of the last true stars of heavily rhinestoned, old-guard Nashville. Exactly the scene guys like Waylon Jennings and Hank Williams Jr. were actively working to distance themselves from at the time. Remember the moment: The country was just coming down off years of Southern rock dominance — the Allman Brothers, Charlie Daniels, the Outlaws, Molly Hatchet, with its natural bloodlines running straight into Waylon and Willie's Outlaw movement and later into Randy Owen's Alabama. Dolly simply didn't fit anywhere in that lineage. So, after so many years in the business, I suppose I kind of mentally listed her as an outlier.

God knows she tried, though, and this is where the grudging respect kicks in. Did you know she covered Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven"? I sure didn't, not until I stumbled across the fact buried in somebody else's tribute piece today. After five years working country radio, you'd think a detail like that would've crossed my desk at some point.

Apparently her husband Carl was a genuine rock and roll guy with a real soft spot for Zeppelin, and Dolly, being Dolly, didn't just cover the song. Oh, no — she completely reinvented it as a bluegrass-gospel number, which is such a wildly specific and stubborn creative choice that I can't help but respect it even from outside her scene entirely. That kind of crossover fascinates me. Another example of such crossover efforts would be the Foundations' “Baby, Now That I’ve Found You,” as covered by Allison Kraus and Union Station.

That, right there, is probably the most honest tribute I can give her. I never counted myself a Dolly Parton fan in the way plenty of you reading this did. She was Nashville, which wasn't my sound, wasn't the music that shaped my years behind a radio microphone. But a woman who could take a Led Zeppelin epic nobody in their right mind would touch and turn it into gospel bluegrass, purely because it mattered to the man she loved — that's not just talent. That's an artist who genuinely didn't care whether it fit anybody's format, mine included. Which, come to think of it, was the whole point of the Outlaw movement back then.

Rest well, Dolly. Even a guy who spent his rather brief country radio career on the other side of Nashville's fence can tell you earned every bit of what's being said about you today.

Thought of the day: Whoever called it “rush hour” never tried driving southbound on the Cross Bronx at 4:45.

VIP members: You’ve probably got a better comment on this topic than I do today, so have at it. Your voice always matters.

Have a great one, gang. I’ll see you here tomorrow.

Editor's Note: Do you enjoy PJ Media's conservative reporting exposing the radical left and woke media? Support our work so we can keep bringing you the truth.

Join PJ Media VIP and use promo code FIGHT to receive 60% off your membership.