Today is a very sad day. I just saw the news that Dolly Parton has died. And like all Southerners, we do everything with food — we celebrate with it, and we mourn with it. So this morning, once I got past the shock, I remembered I had a box of cake mix and a can of icing on hand, and I decided to make a cake in her honor.
A Childhood Hero
Dolly was a big part of my childhood. I watched her show with Porter Wagoner every weekend, usually curled up with my mom, my dad, or my grandparents — but we all loved it, every one of us. My favorite song as a little girl was “Coat of Many Colors,” about how she came from nothing and how her mother sewed her a coat out of whatever scraps of material they had. I could relate to that, because my own mom made a lot of my clothes growing up. In a way, I think that’s why she became a hero to me even as a child — she made “not having much” feel like something to be proud of.
Later, she wasn’t just a musical artist — she became an actress too, and she never seemed to mind who she worked with. She collaborated with all kinds of artists, though I think she worked longest with Porter Wagoner and Kenny Rogers, making music and shows that people loved for decades.
The Cake: Simple, Like She Was
While I’m telling you about her, let me walk you through the cake. It calls for a cup of milk, half a cup of melted butter, and four eggs mixed into the batter. The recipe doesn’t call for a mixer at all — it just says to put everything in a bowl and whisk it together. And doesn’t that feel like Dolly? Simple. No fuss. Just a sweet country girl at heart, no matter how big she got.
I stirred the batter around, worked out the lumps with my whisk, sprayed my pan, and poured it into a 9×13 — nothing fancy, just simple, the way she was.
A Woman Who Kept Her Life — and Gave Generously
One of the things I always admired about Dolly was that she kept her personal life personal. You didn’t see much of her husband; she kept him out of the spotlight and kept the attention on her music and her movies instead. In today’s world, we want to post everything — every meal, every outing. She never needed that. She let her work speak for itself.
She also never seemed to care what genre she was working in. She was, of course, one of the queens of country music — everyone in my family loved her, from my grandmother down through my parents to my own kids. I don’t think I ever met a single person who didn’t love Dolly, and there’s a reason for that: she was one of the most giving people this world has seen.
She started the Imagination Library, and I remember being amazed when she did it. By that time I had grandchildren, and they started getting books in the mail. I was a school principal then, and we were asked to sign kids up for the program. At that school, so many kids didn’t have a single book in their house — nothing their parents could read to them. Dolly sent them books for free, from birth to age five. That’s how much she loved people.
She loved East Tennessee, too. We lived for a while just outside Pigeon Forge, and when the hurricane devastated East Tennessee, she gave enormous amounts of money to help rebuild it, because she loved her hometown and never forgot where she came from. She wanted to give back. That kind of generosity is rare in this world.
I put the cake in the oven for about 30 minutes while I sat with all of this.
Islands in the Stream and Dollywood Memories
While the cake baked and cooled, I stirred up some store-bought icing — I always do that, it makes it smoother and easier to spread. As I iced the cake, more memories came back.
Back around the summer of 1983, right after my dad died, my mom played “Islands in the Stream” — her duet with Kenny Rogers — all the time. That song will always make me think of Dolly, because my mom loved it, and so did I.
Around that same era, Dolly opened Dollywood in East Tennessee, and it became a wonderful attraction for the whole region. When our boys were in elementary school, we took them, and they loved it — we did too. This past summer, our oldest son went back as an adult and came home so excited, telling me about the rides he remembered from childhood.
Dolly gave so much across the decades — the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, and beyond. A lot of her movies came out in the ’90s, and she had some wonderful ones: 9 to 5, Steel Magnolias, among others I truly loved.
Still Reinventing Herself, Even in Her 70s
What impresses me most, looking back, is that even in her 70s, Dolly kept reinventing herself. She recorded Christian music with Zach Williams (“There Was Jesus”) and with For King and Country (“God Only Knows”). Even that late in life, she was still doing what she loved and living out her faith. She won her very last award just this month — a career that spanned from the 1980s all the way to 2026.
She was a remarkable person, and I believe that today, Jesus said to her: “Well done, good and faithful servant.”
We’ll get back to our regular cooking and recipes this week, but I couldn’t let this day pass without honoring an icon from my childhood.
Thanks for reading, and have a great day.