The Scottish poet Robert Burns surely didn’t have a buxom country superstar in mind when he first penned the phrase that ultimately became “a gentleman and a scholar” (in Burns’s turn of phrase, the order was reversed), but few celebrities can make more rightful claim to the title of “gentleperson and scholar” than Dolly Parton.
■ Dexter Holland of The Offspring, with his Ph.D. in molecular biology, and Brian May of Queen, with his Ph.D. in astrophysics, are both recognizable scholar-celebrities by conventional measures. But Dolly Parton was a different kind of scholar: Formally educated only through high school, she was honored as a doctor of humane letters by the University of Tennessee for her dedication to advancing literacy.
■ For three decades, she funded and promoted the “Imagination Library” to send a free book a month to young children. It was an act of homage to her father, whose own illiteracy she saw first-hand as a limitation on his life. One thesis written on the effects of the Imagination Library program reported real evidence of important effects on literacy and cognitive development.
■ She may have been famous in no small part for her colorful and sometimes cheerfully irreverent personality, but we find the gentlelady in her acts: The books for children, the funding of medical research, and the quiet reinvestment in communities, among other honorable works.
■ At a time when other rich and famous people are feverishly chasing immortality by biohacking and putting their names on buildings, Dolly Parton has easily assured herself of a much more favorable place in popular memory by choosing the purely human route of being a gentleperson and a scholar.
