Dolly Parton died on Wednesday at age 80. She was a proud native of Long Carolina Tennessee and a child of the Great Smoky Mountains. The guitar lick on Jolene, which she came up with herself, still gives me chills.
Even though the news of her death left me teary-eyed, I’m not really equipped to write a meaningful remembrance. Many friends and writers I respect have done that here, here, and here. The Assembly already tackled the Could Dolly Parton Happen Here? angle and did it well. I’ve kinda written about Dolly’s late brother Randy, who opened a big theater in (squints) Roanoke Rapids that bled money and closed for 10 years (It’s back open and the property’s being turned into a resort with an indoor water park, none of which bears the Parton name anymore).
Instead, I want to talk about Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library. If you don’t know, it’s a program that mails a book a month to kids under five, free of charge, for any parent who signs up. There are a lot of things that Dolly Parton has done to help others. She helped fund COVID vaccine research early on in the pandemic. She provided millions in relief money after wildfires in Tennessee and after the flooding caused by Hurricane Helene. She’s also been behind acts of generosity big and small, some of which are only now coming to light.
But her book-giving gift may be her greatest gift of all. The Imagination Library began in 1995 in Parton’s home county in Tennessee. Since then, it’s given out more than 332 million books across the United States and four other countries. Part of the genius of it is that, in most places, you didn’t have to jump through many hoops to start getting books for your kids. You’d just sign up, and the stories would come. That was it. It didn’t matter how much you made, or where you lived. Any kids could get books. When kids aged out, Parton sent them a graduation letter, which has been making grown parents cry for quite a while now.
That said, the program does cost money. Several states, like Kentucky, Indiana, Maine, and Washington all cut (or attempted to reduce) funding for the Imagination Library, according to Newsweek. Some reversed course. Others decided to get more private donations to make up for the reduction in state funds. Dave Jorgenson, the former Washington Post TikTok guy, has a good summation here:
The same sort of thing happened in North Carolina too. Last February, Smart Start, which administers the Imagination Library at the state level, said it had run out of state money, and that new children wouldn’t be able to enroll statewide. Some places still could take new kids. Other places couldn’t. That led to some confusion. Some people blamed state lawmakers for cutting funding, and others thought this was the beginning of the end of the Imagination Library in North Carolina. Even as recently as Monday, two days before Parton’s death, some articles seemed to imply that funding for the library was going down. So, what’s going on?
The folks at Smart Start led me through it. First off, the Imagination Library has been in this state for more than two decades, after a school librarian in Mitchell County created the first local partnership in North Carolina in 2006. In 2017, North Carolina became the second state after Tennessee to expand the Imagination Library statewide, thanks to $7 million a year in funding that was put into the budget by state lawmakers.
It’s worth noting here that Parton herself isn’t paying for all of this. Her Dollywood Foundation picks the books, handles the mailing, and covers the costs of administering the program nationwide. But local organizations, both states, non-profits, and a patchwork of private organizations are the ones who actually enroll new kids and pay for the books and postage. Smart Start made a graphic to show how it all works:
In all, the program only costs $2.60 a month per kid, and has put nearly 25 million books in the hands of children in North Carolina since 2017. “We hear that kids are waiting at the mailbox when it’s time for the books to come,” Laura Bilbro-Berry, Smart Start’s literacy manager, told me this week.
Bilbro-Berry says that the Imagination Library’s growth has been steady, but last year, it ran into the realities of the state budget process. In 2023, lawmakers gave the program an extra $1.5 million in one-time funding to help it grow. But then the state just… didn’t pass another budget. Bilbro-Berry says as the program continued to get bigger, the funding did not, and there wasn’t a state budget passed to increase it. Meaning in February 2025, Smart Start hit the limits of the budget, and ran out of state funding to enroll new kids (the kids who were already in the program would continue receiving books).
It’s possible that you may not have noticed this. There are 75 local partnerships that take part in the Imagination Library. Some 58 of them stepped up, raised money, and used community funds to allow new kids to get books. “We learned a lot,” says Bilbro-Berry. “Some of the fundraising that has happened in that process has allowed us to serve more and more children.”
Even so, others had to put things on pause. Earlier this year, before the budget process really got going, a bipartisan group of lawmakers introduced a bill to get more money to Smart Start for the Imagination Library. It didn’t go anywhere.
All of that changed over the summer. When the budget passed, lawmakers not only gave the Imagination Library an extra million dollars every year, but it also set aside $5 million for the Program, which can be spent between now and 2032. Translation: The pause has been lifted, and the extra money will allow the program to keep enrolling new kids in all 100 counties, even if it takes a while for the next budget to pass. “We don’t want to be in a situation where we have to pause again,” says Bilbro-Berry.
Parton’s family, after her death, told people that instead of sending flowers, they should send donations to the Imagination Library. Smart Start has noticed an uptick. And they’ve always noticed the effects the books can have. According to their own surveys, 43% of parents in the program said that if not for the Imagination Library, they wouldn’t have been able to buy as many books for their kids. That’s also meant more parents have been reading more to their kids. “We’re saddened by the loss of Dolly Parton, but it’s encouraging to see her legacy live on,” Bilbro-Berry tells me. “Instilling that love of reading is hard to measure. It’s hard to put a price on that.”
Even after kids age out, the books remain. The night before Parton’s death, my daughter, who’s about to turn 10, pulled out a book from her shelf at bedtime. She called me in so she could read it to me. So we sat there and she read “Philomena’s New Glasses,” a whimsical and cute story about guinea pigs who wear glasses and dresses. I looked at the jacket, and noticed the Imagination Library logo at the bottom. “Dolly Parton sent you that book,” I told her. She smiled.