Rhinestones, C ‘n’ Dubya, and the Gospel

Dolly Rebecca Parton Dean (January 19, 1946 – August 25, 2026)

Charles Brammall

Each of our kids has their own songs, “Son of a Preacher Man”, “Little Ray of Sunshine”, a US3 song I can’t find anymore, and “Baba O’Reilly” by the Who. Our cat Julie (or “Jew-ie” as we call her), has her own song as well: “Jew-ie, Jew-ie, Jew-ie, Jew-ie ie ie…”, sung to the tune of Dolly’s “Jolene”. Octogenarian Miss Parton, our fellow adopted sister of the Lord, went to be with her Saviour yesterday.

But the most revealing thing about Dolly’s extraordinary life may not be Jolene, 9 to 5, or I Will Always Love You. Nor the wigs, the rhinestones or the jokes. It may be the old Smoky Mountain trust in Jesus underneath it all. Her nephew (and security guy) Bryan Seaver said after her death that “Dolly has lived in the light, and is in the arms of Jesus”, adding that she was surely reunited with her husband Carl, her parents and others “in the heavens”.

Cabin Pentecostalism

Parton was born in rural Tennessee in 1946, the fourth of twelve children. Her maternal grandfather, Reverend Jake Owens, was a Pentecostal preacher, and Dolly began singing in church when she was about six.

She learned music not primarily from records but from home: her mother, Avie Lee, sang hymns and old Appalachian ballads while cooking, sewing and doing chores; relatives played guitars, banjos and mountain instruments. Dolly later said this family music-making influenced her more than famous stars. She learnt harp and saxophone, but her guitar was to become her dearest friend. 

She called the church of her childhood a “shouting, healing, holy-roller” church and remembered its “free-spirited” worship. “I really learned to sing in church,” she said, “with emotion.” She would get up and sing a gospel song whenever she had written one. This is important: Parton’s vocal urgency, emotional directness and storytelling, are inseparable from Pentecostal worship.

Her grandpa was not merely a decorative religious influence. Dolly and her aunt Dorothy Jo Hope later wrote Daddy Was an Old Time Preacher Man about him. The song affectionately remembers a preacher who, in Dolly’s colourful phrase, “preached hell so hot that you could feel the heat.” She remembered the old Church of God services with particular affection: “I always loved to sing in church.” 

No Damascus road

There is an important qualification to the word conversion. As with the vast majority believers, in my experience, I cannot find a reliable account of Dolly describing one dramatic conversion experience, altar call or precise moment when she “surrendered to Jesus”.

Her story is much more Appalachian than Pauline: she grew up inside Christianity, absorbed Scripture, prayer and gospel music from childhood, and questioned aspects of what she had been taught And she continued to gossip God throughout her life.

Indeed, she once joked to US journalist and host Terry Gross that she “used to sin at church and sin at home”, laughing about sneaking outside during services to look at boys. Yet immediately afterwards she said, “I had a deep faith in God.” (Fresh Air Archive). That combination is quintessential Dolly: confession without self-dramatisation, holiness without pretending she was a plaster saint.

Her childhood preaching also frightened her. “I was scared to death of hellfire and brimstone,” she recalled. Eventually she had to distinguish the God of Scripture from the distorted picture of God she had received. “I can’t deal with this,” she said of the cruel image of God she had once feared. (Interview Magazine)

That distinction matters theologically. Dolly never became a systematic theologian, and one should not force Westminster categories into her testimony. But neither should her later language about being “spiritual” simply be translated as unbelief.

Bible girl

Her relationship with Scripture became remarkably personal. During one particularly dark period she described taking “the only lifeline I could think of”: the Bible. She read it “cover to cover, a little every day”. One verse suddenly made sense to her: 1 Thess 5:17- “Pray without ceasing.” She eventually understood it as an ongoing conversation with God. (Guideposts)

That is strikingly close to the NT’s own picture of prayer. “Without ceasing”, or “constantly”, isn’t necessarily a command to remain verbally on one’s knees every second- but to live with God continually in view. And to beseech Him for things, often, and with complete trust.

Dolly also described a daily habit: “Every single day, before I do anything, I wake up and I thank God for the night” and asks him to guide her, lead her and help her “uplift mankind and glorify him”. (Premier Christianity)

There is something wonderfully old-fashioned about that. It is akin to Augustine’s Confessions’s famous introduction, “Our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” Dolly’s spirituality, at its best, is similarly relational: wake up, look upward, ask for help, then get on with the day’s work.

Sin, grace and the Cross

Here we need to be precise. Dolly clearly believed in sin, God’s mercy, and Jesus. In resurrection, and life forever. But she did not, as far as documentary evidence shows, ever speak a developed doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement, (as, I would venture to suggest, very few believers can). It would therefore be wrong to manufacture a Dolly quote about Jesus bearing God’s wrath in the sinner’s place.

Nevertheless, some of her own songs come remarkably close to classic evangelical categories. In Welcome Home, she explicitly sings of Jesus dying “for all our sins”, of God’s love in sending his Son, and of Christ living, dying and rising again. (Vagalume)

And then there is He’s Alive, which she discovered almost accidentally on a remote radio station while travelling with husband Carl Thomas Dean. She and Dean actually stopped at a servo to find out who had recorded it. Dolly said it was the story of the Crucifixion through Peter’s eyes and called it “so emotional”. (Interview Magazine)

That is profoundly Christian territory: human betrayal, Christ’s suffering, and death. His resurrection, and grace. It echoes Isaiah’s mysterious Servant, “pierced because of our rebellion” (Isa 53:5). But also the Apostle’s even plainer statement that Messiah “died for (in place of, instead of, as a substitute for), our sins” (1 Cor 15:3).

The old evangelical fathers would have pressed the question further. Anselm asked how God’s honour could be restored; Luther saw Christ standing in the sinner’s place; Calvin spoke of Christ bearing the judgement belonging to us. John Stott later called the cross “the self-substitution of God”— the holy God himself providing the sacrifice by which sinners are reconciled.

Dolly did not write The Cross of Christ. She wrote country songs. But when she sings that Jesus died “for all our sins”, she is standing in the long Christian river that runs from Calvary through Augustine, Luther and Stott, to modern evangelical preaching.

Dolly’s funny theology

(Like her Lord), she was also wonderfully resistant to religious solemnity becoming religious pomposity.

The Bible itself gives her some ammunition. “A joyful heart is good medicine” (Proverbs 17:22). Ecclesiastes 3:4 says there is “a time to laugh”. Elijah, meanwhile, mocks the prophets of Baal by suggesting their god might be asleep, travelling or “on the road” (1 Kings 18:27- lit., “on the loo”). God’s Words are considerably funnier than many Christians allow it to be.

My brother and I have a decades long tradition- we decorate each other’s birthday cards with the weirdest, most obscure, absurd sounding, little-known verses we can:

Think “superfluity of naughtiness” in James 2:21. And the Lord saying to the apostles (with a wry grin?) in Mark 7, “Are you SO dull?!”.

The donkey says to Baalam in Numbers 22:28–30 “You have made me look like a fool! If I had a sword in my hand, I’d kill you now!”

In Acts 20:9–10 when is Paul is preaching til the wee smalls (longest sermon ever?!), and a young chap Eutychus is so bored he falls out of a 3 storey building and lands on the footpath with an almighty thwack. Paul bolts down the stairs, hugs him, and says to the ghoulish onlookers: “Don’t be alarmed, because he’s alive!”

Really?!!

Then the preacher goes back upstairs and keeps preaching til dawn! So Acts contains the earliest recorded church-service complaint: “Our Conservative Evangelical Minister preached until dawn! It was SO boring that one of the Youth Group man fell out window!”

Shakespeare knew this too. “The quality of mercy is not strain’d,” says Portia in Merchant.

Meanwhile, English poet and orator, George Herbert could turn theology into domestic poetry: (God’s) “Love bade me welcome.” Dolly’s genius lies partly in the same instinct: put enormous things into ordinary language.

Mum Avie Lee taught almost a Christian philosophy in miniature: “We got love. We got kindness. We got understanding. We got a lot of stuff that money don’t buy.” Dolly turned that memory into Coat of Many Colors, connecting her poverty with Joseph’s coat, and discovering riches in love rather than possessions. (Press.org)

Carl and their private life

Carl Dean was famously private. Dolly once called him “the love of my life and the life of my love”; he responded after their 59th anniversary, “I wouldn’t trade the last 50 years for nothing on this earth.” (Biography)

They had no children, but Dolly interpreted that through providence rather than bitterness: “God has a plan for everything.” She eventually said, “God didn’t let me have children so that all kids could be mine.” (Us Weekly)

That became the Imagination Library, through which she gave millions of children books. It is not the gospel of course, and Christian theology must never confuse philanthropy with justification. But Christians have ALWAYS been bookish- wherever reading is learnt God’s Word always ends up going.

And Ephesians 2:10 gives us the proper relationship: we are saved by GRACE, “created in Christ Jesus FOR good works”. Good works do not purchase salvation; they can become its beautiful fruit, out of overwhelming gratitude to Him. 

Carl himself was not a public Christian spokesman, so we must resist laims about his precise theology. The Mrs though, repeatedly spoke of Hubby as someone through whom she perceived what she called “God clues”. Their marriage remained one of the quiet stabilising structures beneath her spectacular public life. (Showbiz Cheat Sheet)

Country gospel

Dolly’s musical influences were wonderfully untidy and eclectic- chaotic even. Her first great musical teachers were Mum, grandparents, aunts and uncles; then came Appalachian balladry, and Pentecostal gospel. Followed swiftly by “ALL kinds of music- Country AND Western”. Then Bluegrass and the Carter Family tradition. Brother in Christ Johnny Cash (“The Man in Black”- to symbolise his sin), introduced her at the Grand Ole Opry (at which I have seen a gig- O, M, Gosh!), when she was 13 (The Library of Congress)

Cash himself is an illuminating comparison: another country superstar whose music constantly crossed the boundary between country confession and Gospel proclamation. Miss Parton once called Cash an inspiration, although she famously remembered him as the first man who made her understand “sex appeal”. Even Dolly’s theology could not escape a joke. (American Songwriter)

Her friend Kenny Rogers also belonged to the spiritual landscape around her. When he died, Dolly did not offer vague celebrity consolation. Through tears she said, “God bless you Kenny. Fly high, straight to the arms of God,” before telling everyone else to “keep the faith”. (E! Online)

Christian artists

Her later collaborations made the Christian dimension unmistakable. With Zach Williams she recorded There Was Jesus, which reached No. 1 on multiple Christian charts and won the Grammy for Best Contemporary Christian Music Performance/Song. Dolly called the song “a Godsend”. (Dolly Parton)

Williams’ final tribute was strikingly personal: “Dolly, your songs, your faith, and the way you loved people impacted me more than you probably ever will know.” He said she demonstrated that success need not change one’s heart and that God’s gifts could be used “to make life a little better for somebody else”. (christianpost.com)

Dolly also recorded God Only Knows with for KING & COUNTRY and Faith with Galantis. She explained that she had begun wanting to do more explicitly faith-based music because she felt “God was calling me into that”. She said she had always regarded her music as more like “my ministry than a job”. (Yahoo)

That word, ministry, is significant. It does not mean every Dolly song is Christian. Jolene is not a hymn, (nor is a recent song, “Son of Joelene”, or her recent Wiggles collaboration. I heard the Aussie kids’ outfit on the radio from Ontario today- they were in tears.)

Nor is 9 to 5 a psalm. But Dolly understood vocation as something received, not merely manufactured.

And yet…

Theologically, Dolly remains complicated.

She stopped attending church regularly. She sometimes called herself “not that religious” (as Jesus would have, I believe), but “very, very spiritual”. She expressed that “faith is in the heart”. She also said she did not follow particular religious traditions and that she had studied other religions. (Interview Magazine)

As a Bible Christian I should therefore neither canonise Dolly nor dismiss her. In fact, we can gratefully and fruitfully take a leaf out of her book with regard to studying other religions.

We should rejoice wherever she confessed Christ, while recognising that some of her later theological language was broad enough to encompass a less distinctly Christian spirituality. The NT test is not whether somebody says “God” frequently; it is whether the Son is confessed truthfully. “No one can say, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ except by the Holy Spirit”, 1 Cor 12:3.

Dolly’s strongest statements are distinctly Christological: Jesus died for sins; Jesus rose; God sent his Son. Christ receives the believer; prayer is directed to God; and Scripture shapes her imagination. Heaven is home. If that’s not a sister in Christ I’ll eat my hat. 

But her weakest statements are those in which Christianity dissolves into generic “energy”, goodness or spirituality. That is precisely where evangelical discernment must remain awake. But I wake weak statements, and do weak things- all the time. Daily in fact. Multiple times each day, to my shame. Funny that. It’s called sin. 

The rhinestone paradox

Perhaps the most delightful irony is that Dolly’s outward appearance has often looked almost designed to replicate the flamboyant, Prosperity Gospel Pentecostal world in which she was raised. Big hair, enormous eyelashes, and plunging cleavage. (Growing up we we actually had a cake tin called a “Dolly Vardin”, mirroring the shape of her enormous bosom.)

Because sequins and outrageous jokes sometimes seem to sit rather strangely beside old hymns, Scripture memorisation and a grandfather who preached hell.

But Dolly herself saw the contradiction differently. She remembered childhood Bible stories, fairy tales, and kings and queens as part of the imaginative world that taught her there was something beyond the mountains. Her glamour, she said, came from “a country girl’s idea of what glamour is”. (Interview Magazine)

There is an almost Chestertonian quality to that. Chesterton loved paradox (think that truly extraordinary novel “The Man Who Was Thursday”), because Christianity itself is paradoxical: strength in weakness, glory in humiliation, and life through death. Riches through poverty.

Our songbird understood at least some of that instinctively. She came from a cabin and became a superstar; wore rhinestones while singing gospel; laughed about sin while speaking seriously about God; and stopped attending church while continuing to pray; She became fabulously wealthy while remembering poverty; and spent enormous resources giving books to children.

The final theological word, however, cannot belong to Dolly.

It belongs to Jesus.

Paul says that Christ “died for our sins according to the Scriptures”, was buried, and was raised on the third day (1 Cor 15:3–4). Isaiah echoes from centuries before that the Servant was wounded for the rebellion of others. Peter says Christ “bore our sins in his body on the tree” (1 Pet 2:24). 

That is the heart of justice substitution: the sinless Christ willingly bears the justice due to sinners, so that guilty people can be forgiven and reconciled to God. At the cross mercy triumphs over justice- God’s mercy to us, and Jesus’ undeserved justice in our place.

Dolly did not formulate the doctrine with the precision of John Stott, J. I. Packer or Don Carson. But whenever her songs turn from vague spirituality towards Jesus dying “for all our sins”, the old Gospel suddenly comes sharply into focus, and we blood drip from the Old Rugged Cross.

And perhaps that is the most fitting way to remember our Doll- not as a theological authority, nor a flawless Christian celebrity- but a spectacularly gifted woman whose deepest musical vocabulary was learned in a little Pentecostal church in the Smoky Mountains.

She sang about poverty, jealousy, and sex; work, loneliness, and love; death, forgiveness and home. That is, Gospel issues- the effect of Jesus’ death on EVERYTHING. 

And underneath the rhinestones, again and again, came the old country-gospel question:

When everything else is gone, where is home?

For Dolly, the answer was ultimately Jesus the Nazarene, God the Son, executed Messiah.

And the last word she wanted sung at her funeral was not I Will Always Love You, but the old country-gospel hymn “If We Never Meet Again”, her father’s favourite, which had also been sung at his funeral. (ew.com)

That is a very Dolly ending: sentimental, funny, and homespun. Deeply Southern (where I used to live, to my great delight). And, at its best, pointing beyond the performer to the One she believed was waiting at home.