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In news from around the nation, the Associated Press and Williamsport Sun-Gazette reported last weekend on bipartisan efforts in Tennessee to rename Nashville's international airport after musician Dolly Parton.
While we can understand and appreciate skepticism about naming airports or other facilities after entertainers, Nashville's history and renown is joined at the hip to country and western music -- and Parton was more than an entertainer.
Parton's philanthropic efforts were also legendary.
Billboard.com, which follows the music industry noted her decades of contributions soon after her death. She founded the Imagination Library, which provided more than 300 million books to children around the world. In 1988, her Dollywood Foundation tackled high school drop-out rates in her native Sevier County, Tennessee. Its efforts led the drop-out to fall from 35 percent to 6 percent. In 1991, the amusement park she owned, Dollywood, spearheaded a 30,000-square-foot aviary to shelter the largest number of "non-releasable" bald eagles in the world. In 2000 the Dollywood Foundation launched scholarship programs. In 2007 she organized and headlined a benefit concert to build a more modern hospital in Sevier County and in 2016 she organized a telethon to raise more than $13 million for wildfire relief. In 2017, she donated $1 million to a Nashville children's hospital and in 2021 she rallied Tennessee and the music industry to assist the survivors of flooding in the mid-section of the Volunteer State.
Dolly Parton's life and legacy go well beyond her hit songs, movies and successes in business. Her sense of charity and volunteerism deserve the commemoration Tennessee officials are deliberating.