Leslie Maxwell has always loved Dolly Parton. She remembers loving “Islands in the Stream,” Parton’s 1983 duet with Kenny Rogers, when she was growing up in Charlotte. But she didn’t start using her to teach until Parton started experiencing her late-career explosion in appreciation.
“There was a move toward – almost like, in some ways, nostalgia,” says Maxwell, who teaches freshman writing seminars in Duke’s Writing and Rhetoric Program. “It was this desire to want to see something good, to come together.” She remembers noticing it especially in the late 2010s. The podcast “Dolly Parton’s America” began in 2019, examining Parton’s singular appeal to all swaths of a deeply divided nation.
Then came COVID. Maxwell’s daughter was already receiving books every month from Parton’s Imagination Library, which has delivered more than 200 million free books to children. Early in the pandemic, Parton started making videos of herself reading books to children, in her pajamas in bed.
“We watched those,” Maxwell recalls, “and it kind of struck me. This is this super famous superstar and here she is making these videos because she wanted to make kids happy, bring them some comfort in those first kind of really uncertain days of COVID. And it really struck me just how incredible that was.”
Maxwell’s writing classes teach students to do research, engage with texts, persuade – the standard freshman writing tasks. “I like to create classes about things I wonder about, things that interest me,” she says. “And there were all these things that were telling me, like … Dolly.”
It was also the 2020 presidential election season, and she saw tongue-in-cheek stickers for Dolly as president. So there Maxwell was, developing a writing class: Dolly Parton for President?
“It’s certainly not unprecedented for celebrities to get into politics,” she says, without a trace of irony. But her class title came “with a question mark,” she emphasizes. Parton, while radiating kindness and acceptance, worked hard to project an apolitical persona, which could itself be a topic for a student to engage with in the class. Maxwell encourages her students to engage with Parton and her life in any number of ways: “a close reading of song lyrics, a research project, her connection to education, her broad appeal. It could be a question why people, even as a joke, might say, ‘Dolly for president.’”
So, for years, her students have engaged not just with writing but with Parton, and when Parton died, Maxwell heard from them. “Most of them said that hearing about Dolly reminded them of being in our class,” she recalls. “Some of them reflected on what it meant to learn about Dolly, what it meant to spend that kind of focused time learning about Dolly and kind of unpacking the complicated person that we all are, and she was.”
And some, for whom “their first year of college might be a few years” in the past, “it kind of brought them back to that time and reminded them of Dolly’s songs that they grew to appreciate over the course of the semester.”
If there was an overarching theme to what she heard from her former students it was “that Dolly reminded us to be kind to other people and to live our lives with kindness.”
Maxwell recently shared a piece about her feelings called “Dolly Is for Everyone,” but she hasn’t stopped thinking about her. She says Parton is so magnetic because she is that rare public person who shows her humanity. Celebrities are larger than life – “Dolly’s big hair, her flashy outfits – she kind of embodied that larger-than-life figure for us,” she says, but “her humor, her vulnerable and honest songs, her generosity, I think also helped people see her as a human being.”
A lyric Maxwell uses in her class, and to which she returns now, is one in which Parton uses the rhetorical trick of antiphrasis – saying the opposite of what is true. In the song “The Grass is Blue,” a sorrowful lover tries to convince herself that she’s fine without her lost partner: “There’s snow in the tropics/ there’s ice on the sun/ it’s hot in the arctic/ and crying is fun,” she sings.
Then she says how she feels alone – and, now, how Maxwell feels, and how we all feel, without Parton: “I’m perfectly fine/ and I don’t miss you/ the sky is green/ and the grass is blue.”