Grounded: The Dolly and Wendell Vibe

The flags in our office were at half mast twice last week.

I was almost done with my blog post on Dolly Parton, who died at 80 after a brief battle with cancer, when news came last week of poet, author, and advocate Wendell Berry’s death at 92.  Those who knew of them might not think they had much in common. Quite the contrary, they actually shared, as the kids say, “a vibe.”

For about four days after Dolly’s passing, everyone seemed to agree that “she was the one thing we all had in common.” I have never seen so much written after a celebrity's death, other than possibly Michael Jackson's. Dolly’s nephew said she'd "lived in the light and is in the arms of Jesus." NPR called her “brilliant, melodic, and trailblazing.” Someone started a petition years ago to replace a Confederate statue in the Tennessee capitol with one of her, and it got 23,000 signatures before she asked them to stop. It seems she walked on water.

When Wendell Berry died at his home in Port Royal, Kentucky, he didn’t leave behind a wardrobe with rhinestones, social media accounts, photos of packed stadiums, a cell phone or a computer (that I know of). There were, however, seven decades of gentle essays, poems, and stories written from the same Henry County farm his family had worked for generations. 

What I’ve been pondering is: what attributes did they share in common that, in such a polarized time, people from across the ideological spectrum would want to claim them?  

The National Organization for Women called Dolly a feminist icon. My friend Kathryn ran a piece in National Review calling her "our pro-life hero" the same week. GLAAD and HRC issued statements honoring decades of LGBTQ allyship. In 2024 The Federalist ran a piece accusing her of preaching a "false gospel" for refusing to call anyone's sin a sin, but over the past weeks ran at least six op-eds celebrating her. Vox found a "dark side" to her likability and then Fox News found a conspiracy in Vox for saying so (in their seventh op-ed The Federalist piled on too). 

Wendell never generated that kind of tug-of-war, but he had his own version of it. Progressives claimed him for his environmentalist conscience, based on a lifetime spent warning against industrial agriculture and the corporate takeover of rural communities. At the same time, conservatives and traditionalists claimed him as an agrarian who never trusted "progress" for its own sake. He wrote "If you subtracted the Gospels and the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence from my work, there wouldn't be very much left." [1] His focus on care for the environment, responsible animal husbandry, family and local community seemed to appeal across the spectrum, from Plough Magazine, to The Free Press, the New York TImes and The Bulwark.

What I actually think appeals to us all about them, however, is that they each knew who they were and lived consistently with their inner convictions without judgment or apparent disdain for those who might disagree. They were grounded.

Grounded in Self-Confidence.  Dolly said no to Elvis Presley and Colonel Parker over ownership of "I Will Always Love You," at a moment when saying no could have cost her the biggest payday of her career, but it didn’t deter her from building a business empire. She defended her gay fans publicly in the 1980s, at the height of the AIDS panic, when doing so carried real commercial risk in country music. None of that is the profile of a woman who avoided taking positions. It's the profile of a woman secure enough in what she believed that she didn't need the argument to go her way in order to keep believing it.

Wendell's confidence looked like 60 years of essays nobody asked him to write, arguing that a healthy economy has to be built on healthy land and healthy communities, not the other way around. He opposed the Vietnam War, opposed mountaintop-removal coal mining, and kept writing about the dignity of small farms straight through decades in which almost nobody in publishing thought that was a fashionable subject. He didn't need the argument to go his way either, and he just kept making his case, book after book, regardless of the winds of fashion.

Grounded in Humility and Grace. Dolly turned down two Presidential Medals of Freedom and asked her own state legislature to pull a bill that would have put her statue on the capitol grounds, saying she didn't think it was appropriate "at this time." She called herself unworthy of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and tried to withdraw her own nomination — twice — before finally, gracefully, letting them induct her anyway. She said, more than once, that she wasn't a "good enough Christian" to sit in judgment of other people. "I have my opinion," she said, "but I learned years ago to keep my mouth shut about things." 

On the other hand although Wendell didn’t shut his mouth with his opinions, he didn’t bully people with them. For ninety-two years, he was reachable only by letter or a visit, on the same farm for generations. He let his stories carry the argument gently and with beauty. In his poem, “The Peace of Wild Things,” instead of mentioning industrial agriculture and the despair he spent writing against it, he describes lying down in the clearing until fear passes, and lets the reader find their way to hope. 

Grounded in Marriage. Perhaps this is the standout in today’s “easy to divorce” or “slow to marry” culture. Dolly and Wendell’s lives were both anchored by stable marriages that were without scandal or even a public presence. This is especially rare in celebrity culture, in which only a handful of stars stay married to one person for life. Dolly met Carl Thomas Dean outside the Wishy Washy Laundromat in Nashville in 1964 at 18 (he was a 21-year-old asphalt contractor). Wendell and Tanya Amyx met while attending theUniversity of Kentucky and were married in 1957, raising their family on the same land Wendell's people had farmed before him. Two marriages, two very different kinds of fame, but the same solid foundation for them to stand on.

Grounded in Place. Dolly's Imagination Library grew directly out of her own Sevier County, Tennessee, childhood, built for kids who grew up the way she did. Dollywood represented her commitment to honor and celebrate the “home” she grew up in, a two-room shack that held  fourteen people. Wendell's commitment to place was just as radical, lived out both in life and on the written page. Port Royal, Kentucky was not a fictitious community, but the return address on his letters,the only way to reach him. Neither of them left the place that made them. Both spent their fame trying to make sure that their place, and places like it,  and the people who lived there, would survive long after they themselves were gone.

Grounded in Faith. Dolly's faith was plainspoken and undogmatic, as her songs and her actions sang. Wendell was no theologian either, by his own account, but as we wrote in our Salt and Light Story on his life, faith ran through his work all the same. He put it more sharply than that himself: our destruction of nature isn't just bad stewardship, he wrote, it's "the most horrid blasphemy.” Neither Dolly nor Wendell reduced faith to a slogan, but rather both let their faith undergird everything they made without ever standing in the pulpit to explain it.

Long before Dolly Parton or Wendell Berry were grounding themselves in the values of their communities, the Clapham Sect in England was being built on the foundation that one can “make friends of enemies.” William Wilberforce didn't win his allies by convincing them he had no politics. In fact, he had ferociously specific ones, notably about slavery. He won enemies into allies by living a life whose fruit was undeniable even to people who thought his theology was suspect or his cause was naive. He had confidence in his convictions, humility about his own centrality to his work, and grace toward the people not yet persuaded. Hannah More didn't get invited into rooms because she muted what she believed. She was welcomed because what she believed came wrapped in an evident, costly love for the people in front of her. That's the tradition our firm is named after, and it seems to me this was the way in which Dolly and Wendell conducted their public and private lives. 

Other than a close encounter with her Imagination Library charity, we never had a chance to work with Dolly. However, we were blessed to be able to collaborate with Wendell twice. When we asked his permission to adapt his poem "The Peace of Wild Things" into a mini-comic for our Salt and Light series, he wrote back by hand, on Lanes Landing Farm letterhead. With his renowned dry humour, he wrote that he couldn't quite conceive of the poem as a "mini-comic" or see anything comical about it, but so long as we printed it whole, exactly as he'd written it, he supposed we couldn't hurt it. That's the grace that let our sister company MORE Productions and the Correll family of Stanford, Kentucky collaborate with Rabbit Room during the COVID shutdown to produce a short film of Wendell's only play, Sonata at Payne Hollow (which you can watch here).

"The Peace of Wild Things" is by Wendell Berry, published by Counterpoint Press (New Collected Poems, 2012). This illustrated adaptation is used with the author's permission.

Dolly and Wendell were grounded in who they were, where they were from and Whose they are. I think this is why so many different groups claim them as their own. People are “fighting over” two people who didn’t fight for themselves, but for their faith, their convictions, and for others. And they did it with humor and grace.

Which is, I'd suggest, exactly the muscle this country has stopped exercising. We resolve tension now by picking a side and deciding the other side isn't just wrong but the enemy. Dolly's public life pushed back against that reflex, not because she lacked convictions, but because she never let confidence in them curdle into contempt for the people who didn't share them, and never let her humility about her own platform stop her from using it. Wendell's whole quiet life was the same rebuke, filed from a much smaller stage. He did not need the argument to go his way either, he let his stories and his poetry make his case, and won over his detractors subsequently. We may have stopped exercising that muscle, but the scale of the response to both of their deaths shows our persisting deep value for it. Every camp that rushed to claim either of them is, in its own way, conceding that they had something worth wanting.  Perhaps that’s worth reading as an invitation to start exercising this muscle again.

Dolly was a big personality, and none of the wrangling over her makes Dolly Parton smaller. Dolly lived her convictions out loud, with confidence, humility and grace for 60 years, all while being married to the same Carl Thomas Dean she met outside the Wishy Washy Laundromat. Wendell lived out the same three virtues in a completely different key: quietly on his farm, unreachable except by a visit, a letter, or through his creative writing, married to his wife Tanya Amyx for 69 years. Confidence, humility, grace anchored in faith and a stable marriage. They had more in common than you might think.

This is the Dolly and Berry vibe.