In a clip that returned to the public spotlight in the wake of Dolly Parton’s passing at the age of 80, the late country music sensation explained in a sit-down interview what inspired her to create what she called the Imagination Library. The shared public-private venture, begun in the early 2000s, has mailed out more than 300 million books since its inception.
For context, the Imagination Library is a program that is free to participating families who enroll in its mission. Funding is often debated, as it relies heavily on tax dollars through the form of non-profits sharing costs alongside school districts, local libraries, and in some cases, overt state funding to acquire books. The Dollywood Foundation pays for administrative costs. Both left-wing and right-wing groups have taken issue at various times, as literature has often been described as “too woke” and “not woke enough.”
“The whole idea of Imagination Library – I guess everybody has their story, and a lot of you may or may not know that much about me personally – but I grew up in the Great Smoky Mountains of East Tennessee, and I grew up in a very large family. There’s 12 of us kids, and my dad was a very hardworking man. He grew up in a family of 14 or 15 kids, and my dad never had a chance to go to school, and daddy couldn’t read or write,” Parton began as she explained the roots of her love of learning and wanting to share with others.
“But he was the smartest person that I’ve ever known, and so I wanted to do something special for him. As the years went by, I saw how kind he was. He thought he couldn’t learn to read after he was grown. It was kind of. It was just one of those things. And so I had the idea to do something special for him. You know, in the Bible where it talks about honoring your father and your mother, I don’t think that necessarily means just to obey them. I think it means to bring honor to their name if you can, so I got my daddy involved with this little program. I wanted him to feel like he was part of something special,” she continued.
“So we started the Imagination Library, where we were giving books to the children in our home county in Sevier County, where we were born and raised. And so we’d hoped that it would do good there, and it became such a popular program that the governor of Tennessee at that time, Phil Bredesen, he thought the idea was so great they took it, went all over Tennessee, and then later it went on into Canada, and now we’re all over the world in different parts of the world,” she went on.
“So my dad got to live long enough to see a lot of it coming to be, and he took such pride in the fact that the little kids called me the book lady. He was prouder of that than anything. So that it started from a true place in my heart, and it’s done so much good for so many people through the years.
“When I was growing up because I personally didn’t like school. I mean, I never would have thought that I’ve done. I do more homework now at night working on all these programs than I ever did in all the years that I was in school, but I never thought about being the book lady, the painted lady, yes, the overexaggerated, overdressed lady, yes. But that just goes to show you that you can’t judge a book by looking at the cover, right?” she finished as the crowd applause her contributions.
Watch Parton discuss the founding and success of Imagination Library below:
Featured image: Screen shot from embedded video