In the days since Dolly Parton’s passing, the tributes have rightly celebrated her extraordinary songwriting and that unmistakable voice. I keep coming back to something else, though: how closely her giving mirrored her music.

She wrote about home, family, hardship, and the belief that where you start doesn’t have to determine where you end up. Then she spent decades building that belief into something real, and she built most of it right where she started.

In 1988, she founded the Dollywood Foundation in her home county of Sevier County, Tennessee, with scholarships and incentives that helped the local dropout rate fall from nearly 40 percent to six percent. In 1995, that same commitment grew into Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, which has now put more than 250 million books into children’s hands. She turned a children’s hospital in Knoxville into one that now carries her name. Through it all, she never let the rhinestones distract from the reason she was wearing them.

What strikes me most is how much of her giving stayed close to home. She poured decades of success back into the same place that raised her, long after she had every reason to look elsewhere. It’s something that I think about often, especially when it comes to children in our own community who could use that same kind of investment. Dolly reminds me why that work matters.

I think that’s why Tennesseans claimed her the way we did, and still do. She never outgrew us. She held the glamour and generosity in the same two hands, easily, the way she held a guitar since she was a girl.

We’re grateful to have called her one of ours.

With love, Julie