Last week we lost Dolly Parton, the undisputed queen of country music. Over nearly seven decades, Dolly swept us away with her outsized personality, her ostentatious outfits, and her immense talent.
Dolly grew up in a one-room shack in rural Tennessee, the fourth of 12 children in a dirt-poor but love-rich family. Her father was an illiterate farmer, and her mother one of those iconic rural homemakers who kept the children in home-stitched clothing—including the “Coat of Many Colors” that became one of Dolly’s most famous anthems.
Her love of music brought teenage Dolly to Nashville, where she debuted at the Grand Ole Opry at age 13. Her meteoric rise to stardom was well-deserved: Her recordings went platinum, and her stage presence thrilled audiences everywhere. She had a flair for composing “singable” songs that instantly made the charts.
Dolly charmed us with her poise, quick wit, sex appeal, and “downhome” values, always grounded in the story embodied in “My Tennessee Mountain Home.”
But Dolly’s music is only one reason that she’ll be remembered. Another is her commitment to children’s literacy and the endangered art of reading books. In her 2012 book Dream More, Dolly announced a preference: “If I’m remembered 100 years from now, I hope it will be not for looks but for books.”
She credited her illiterate father for inspiring her passion for reading, leaving this tribute: “My daddy was the smartest man I have ever known, but I knew his inability to read probably kept him from seeing all of his dreams come true. Inspiring kids to love to read became my mission.”
That mission became a reality in 1995 when Dolly created the Imagination Library, now operating throughout most of the English-speaking world. This project sends a free book every month to families with children under 5. The library, which has distributed almost 300 million books, will be her most enduring legacy, with its mission of encouraging children to ignore all the distractions of our digital age and just enjoy books.
The future of literacy, however, is clouded at best.
The cover story in The Atlantic last month bore the ominous title “The End of Reading is Here.” Author Rose Horowitch makes a powerful case that reading and writing is diminishing to the point of possible extinction. She cites several sad facts:
• Fifty years ago, half of young adults read a daily newspaper; now it’s fewer than 10 percent.
• Most Americans now get news from their devices, and 40 percent prefer audio or video media over reading the news.
• A 2025 survey of secondary school English teachers found that most assign fewer than four books a year, and many assign zero books.
• The average child now spends 4 1/2 hours a day on their screens.
Horowitch asks whether our civilization can survive in this “post-literate” world. We no longer have the patience to read, let alone to write well. Writing and reading exercises one’s power to reason, to think critically, to distinguish bad from good—but that requires work.
In this 21st century “attention economy,” we’re increasingly distracted by apps and devices designed to keep us glued to the screen. Readers face informational overload; writers find that their compositional skills are “farmed out” to generative AI. These models scour the internet to digest the historic legacy of generations of authors before us, feeding us a thin soup of sentences written by computational algorithms divorced from human thought.
We should value good writing by real people. We should take time to read good fiction and nonfiction. How can we save what remains of the literate world we once inhabited? What can we do to honor Dolly Parton’s passion for reading? Here are a couple of suggestions:
• Support state attorneys general who are taking on “big tech” in court to expose their secretive designs that steer children to addictive apps and devices. Just last week, this litigation forced Meta to pay a $1.5 billion penalty and commit to meaningful reforms.
• Support school reforms to limit cellphones in schools and encourage teachers to instill in their students the joy of reading, writing, and reasoning.
• Volunteer to be a “Book Angel” with Everybody Reads – SLO, a project that reaches out to schools and families from San Miguel to Santa Maria. Librarian Liz Krieger launched this project with support from the Miossi Charitable Trust. She and her husband, Dan, regularly gather volunteers at their book-filled home on Islay Street where they box up carefully-curated children’s books to take to book fairs at local schools, where kids select a few books to take home and read.
• Join a local Kiwanis Club like our SLO Morning Kiwanis Club that focuses on supporting children’s literacy projects.
• And above all, keep reading! If you’re lucky enough to be a parent or a grandparent, take every opportunity to read to your little ones. ∆
John Ashbaugh reads digital newspapers every day. Respond with a letter to the editor emailed to letters@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in Sept 3-10, 2026.
In these days of bitter social division and seething anger, it is refreshing to see that Dolly Parton was pretty much universally liked and admired. RIP, Dolly.
Thanks John. There are undoubtedly more things that we agree upon than those that divide us.
True, but if we agreed on everything, we would miss out on the fun of arguing politics.
Someday we should meet in public and talk seriously about the things we agree on, John – but yes, let’s also save time for “the fun.”