How did Dolly Parton unite a polarised America?

**Jon Sopel** (0:02)
This is a Global Production.

**Lewis Goodall** (0:05)
She was a poet, and her poetry was about the ordinary lives of so many Americans. She supported, avowedly, gay marriage, LGBTQ rights, Black Lives Matter. She managed to make both Republican and Democrat adore her.

**Jon Sopel** (0:21)
She just walked that path so brilliantly, just transcended all of those things that divide people.

**Lewis Goodall** (0:29)
This is a woman who wore the politics lightly and yet had a kind of morality to her, that both a Tennessee churchgoer and a Tennessee drag queen could identify with.

**Dolly Parton** (0:39)
I'm sure I'll be as ridiculous as an old lady as I am as a young one.
Somebody said to me once, what do you want people to say about you a hundred years from now? And I said, I want them to say, boy, does she ever look good for her age. So, that's sort of like a luck and good thing.

**Jon Sopel** (0:56)
Dolly Parton's death announced last night. I mean, really did send shockwaves around the world. Genuine, sincere, outpouring of emotion. For a woman who did that rarest of rare things, she unified America.

**Lewis Goodall** (1:13)
She may have been the most famous woman in the world. But more than that, as Jon said, she was virtually unique. Someone that Democrat and Republican alike could love and adore. What was the secret to that political success in this most outwardly seeming apolitical of women? Welcome to The News Agents.
The News Agents.

**Jon Sopel** (1:42)
It's Jon.

**Lewis Goodall** (1:42)
It's Lewis.

**Jon Sopel** (1:43)
And on our morning call today, we discussed Andy Burnham on the world stage.
We discussed whether we should be doing what's happening to housing in this country or whether enough is being built. We talked about America and sanctions and the war with Iran, and found there was only one thing that we wanted to talk about on the podcast today, and that was Dolly Parton. And that left us with three options. Option one was to say nothing and just play her music for half an hour, but for rights reasons, that's not possible. Option two was to bring back Emily from holiday and have her sing Dolly Parton, the Queen of Appalachia herself. We decided against that, and so you've got me and Lewis talking about the Queen of Country.

**Lewis Goodall** (2:30)
And I think there's a good reason to talk about her life. And of course, there are many people far more qualified than Jon or I, heaven forbid, to talk about her musical achievements and her cultural achievements in that sphere. But I genuinely do think it is worth thinking about Dolly Parton's life politically. And as I was saying at the top there, on one level, that's curious because she is someone who through a multi-decade career spanning more than half a century, tried to move as far away from politics as it was possible to be.
People throughout her entire life constantly tried to draw her on her own policy politics. She always found a very elegant and witty way to sidestep it, including this here, when she was being asked by a reporter, I think how she was going to vote.

**Dolly Parton** (3:16)
I just try to make life a little better. I try to lift things up when they're down. I write my songs about that sort of thing. You'll find me and my opinions, you know, in a lot of the songs. But most of it's based on love and acceptance and lifting people up. I ask God every day to let me be a blessing to mankind and to uphold him and to glorify him. And that's how I go about my day.

**Jon Sopel** (3:39)
No political rallies for you then?

**Dolly Parton** (3:41)
No political rallies for me. I think my joke is that my daddy was a Republican, my mom was a Democrat and I'm a Hippocrat.

**Lewis Goodall** (3:49)
Another time she was asked about whether she was going to run for president, she said, I think there are enough boobs in politics. So, you know, this is a woman who was very, very good at being able to just, you know, very definitely sidestep these questions about politics. And yet she was a deeply political person in what she represented. She wasn't big P party political or big P political. And yet if you look at some of the positions that she held, her most famous song, perhaps 9 to 5, you can argue is basically a feminist and labor anthem about unequal pay and about women in the workplace. She supported avowedly gay marriage, LGBTQ rights, black lives matter, including trans rights as well. She supported lots of causes, some of them political, some not. Most famously, her imagination library, which was dedicated to literacy and books for poor children across the world.