Ever since the news of Dolly Parton’s death on Tuesday, there’s one clip I can’t stop watching. It’s old footage featured in a 2020 documentary, and Dolly’s not singing in it; instead, she’s reading. “She pulled and she tugged. ‘I think I can! I think I can!’ she said”—and of course it’s The Little Engine That Could, the classic folktale made famous by Arnold “Watty Piper” Munk.
Then Dolly turns to the kids huddled around her and says, “Would you help me? All of you, help me!” and she chants with them: “I think I can! I think I can!”
Here is the thing about Dolly Parton: That woman understood the job she had been given to do, and she did it gladly. A lesser personality would have gotten buried under the piles of rhinestones and the 10-ton hair. Not Dolly. She could be hilariously self-aware about her gaudy showgirl style and the silicone under her skin. But she never turned up her nose at her own act or at the fans from her hometown who loved it unabashedly. She knew what she meant to people, and she showed up for them like it was a privilege.
The Little Engine That Could is the first gift you get when you sign up for Dolly’s Imagination Library, a charity program she founded that sends free books to children from birth to age 5. This is by design. The program began in 1995 as a literacy campaign for kids who grew up around where Dolly did. She was born in 1946 to an illiterate father in a one-bedroom log cabin in Locust Ridge, at the feet of Tennessee’s Great Smoky Mountains.
“Daddy couldn’t read or write, but he was the smartest person that I’ve ever known,” she told the Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden at a 2018 ceremony where she donated her 100 millionth book. Today, the charity gives away over three million books per month across all 50 states and several foreign countries, making it one of the largest projects of its kind in the world. It is the sheer embodiment of “I think I can!”
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