Originally published at From The Desk of Jon Harris
On August 25, 2026, Dolly Parton passed away. Six days later, so did Wendell Berry. Both were known for different things. Dolly was an entertainer. Berry was a novelist and activist. But their deaths represent the closing of a chapter for the American South.
During their lifetimes, the Kentucky farmer and the Tennessee crooner managed to keep the respect of the people who surrounded their humble beginnings while simultaneously winning the hearts of blue-city elites who found their traditional Southern charm endearing.
Indeed, there is something respectable about both. Many of us are used to figures like George Clooney or Julia Roberts who grew up in the South but do not present that way. Parton occupied her regional identity without apology, including her accent, style, and references to Christianity. Wendell Berry wrote novels about the kind of characters he grew up around. Both were rooted in a tradition, a land, a home. It never left them. They were authentic.
Yet, from the vantage point of the liberal establishment, they were also the ideal sort of Southerners, occupying the trappings and reaping the benefits of the Christian-influenced society they grew up in while editing out the parts considered odious to cosmopolitan elites.
Parton was not necessarily at the front of the line to cheer the LGBTQ agenda, but she certainly supported its normalization. I remember not too long ago she closed her Christmas show stating that she did not want to force Christianity on her audience the way it had been forced on her growing up. Her Christianity became the rudimentary and therapeutic kind, not the stereotypical fundamentalist finger-wagging kind, even though she originally learned to sing at her grandfather’s Pentecostal church.
Berry, who was forced by his parents to go to a Southern Baptist Church, provided a window into his religious views in his 1986 novel Jayber Crow, where he traces the life of Jayber from birth to death in the fictional town of Port William. Jayber attends seminary but becomes unsatisfied with what he considers to be contradictions in the Bible. His professor tells him, “You will never understand the Bible until you understand that it is not a book of answers.” The rest of the novel is Jayber realizing that true meaning is a mystery. There is a certain kind of providence that works its way through the book.
Jayber sees himself as revering Jesus, but hell, heaven, judgment, and forgiveness are lessons for this life. Perhaps the irony is that Jayber goes to church, even serving as the custodian, and enjoys the social aspect of living with people who try to orient their lives to the Bible and eternal things while remaining a skeptic himself.
But Jayber was not an aggressive Yankee mocking others for their beliefs. He did not try to convince others they were wrong. This quality made him endearing. Dolly was similar in that she graciously handled disagreement by diffusing it, laughing at it, or just poking fun at herself. She was not on a mission to convince. This made both Berry and Parton non-threatening.
The Respectable Southerner
Dolly Parton hardly got political, but when she did, it did not threaten the liberal establishment. I remember going to a diner in Southern California that had a picture of Parton on the wall, posing with a Confederate flag. Yet when the cultural environment shifted, Parton adjusted. In 2018, she eliminated “Dixie” from “Dixie Stampede,” changing the name to “Dolly Parton’s Stampede.” Then, during the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, she said, “Of course Black lives matter. Do we think our little white asses are the only ones that matter? No.”
She adjusted to the environment she was in, but only as much as she needed to in order to maintain her respected position.
Wendell Berry was known for his activism on behalf of environmental issues, but he also campaigned against both the Vietnam War and the Iraq War. He was neither a Marxist nor an uncritical defender of capitalism, but a Southern Agrarian, suspicious of the “progress” technology brought as it separated man from the land and produced negative effects on the environment. As a true localist, he was more inclined to show up at his state capitol to protest something like mountaintop-removal coal mining than he was to give an interview to national media.
On a political spectrum, they are hard to categorize. Neither made a habit of carrying water for the typical progressive narratives like most celebrities, but both were accepted by progressives.
Their quaint dispositions hid just how sophisticated they really were. Berry graduated with a master’s degree in English from the University of Kentucky and received the National Humanities Medal from President Obama. He later delivered the Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, the most prestigious honor the federal government bestows for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities.
Dolly Parton won numerous awards, including 11 Grammys, the Kennedy Center Honors, and the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, an honorary Oscar, in 2025. She also sat atop a roughly $450 million empire that included Dollywood, her music, and other endeavors. She was a businesswoman. Or, in her own words, “I look like a woman but I think like a man. I’ve done business with men who think I’m as silly as I look. By the time they realize I’m not, I’ve got the money and gone.”
Sometimes people from outside their Appalachian world would categorize Berry or Parton improperly. For example, Berry was not a transcendentalist. He did not venture off to Walden Pond to emancipate himself from the constraints of society. Instead, society is what freed him and what he worked toward. He did not want to live alone in nature, but in community with nature. He wanted to use the earth, but not abuse it.
There is an interview from 1977 where Barbara Walters interviews Parton and asks questions like, “Would I have called you a hillbilly?” and “Do you think you are sexy?” She even tells Parton, “You do not have to look like this,” referring to her wigs and extreme clothes. Walters looked at Parton like she were a museum piece, a novelty, a fascination, not a real person, and certainly not a sophisticated one. Parton never ceased to celebrate her roots. She told folksy stories about her momma and daddy and 11 brothers and sisters. She talked about the first time they had electricity. She came from poverty, and in some ways, her values were shaped by it. Those values never really left her.
Both Wendell Berry and Dolly Parton were Southerners, and they chose to remain Southerners, to stay in the states where they were born, to advocate for the people they grew up around, and to speak in the language of Christianity even if they had their own misgivings about the way it was practiced.
The New South
The question I have pondered is what kind of place a Southerner has in the brave new world of tomorrow. Parton and Berry did fine in what Aaron Renn calls both positive and neutral worlds, where Christianity is seen as an asset, or at least not a negative. Would they have been as influential in the negative world we find ourselves in now, where Christianity is seen as a negative?
The native Alabamian Ella Langley’s current success in the music industry may be a clue that people are yearning for tradition and willing to support it when it is presented to them. Like Dolly, Langley grew up singing in a Southern Baptist Church and has spoken openly about her Christian faith. She also comes off as non-threatening. Scott Greer calls this “sunbeltism,” where a watered-down Southern identity is less about Bible-Belt culture warring, the Lost Cause, and agriculture, and more about buying a plastic largemouth bass from China and getting a bellyache at Buc-ee’s.
Luke Bryan used to sing a song called “What Country Is.” One of the lines was, “It ain’t a rebel flag you bought at the mall.” Well, now it may not even be the rebel flag.
Still, this can work to the advantage of Southerners perhaps.
Wendell and Dolly went about as far as an authentic Southerner could go, in terms of respect, in the entertainment and educational establishments. The South was a conquered people struggling to keep up economically. Now, the region has been infused with capital from all over the world.
This may be the cultural kiss of death for some. Go to any large city or suburb around it in the South and you hardly feel like you are in the region, unless you freshly came from somewhere very different like New York. But the reputation has changed, not through caving to political correctness but through the migration of people, the loss of cultural identities in other places, and a sense that the South represents a lost truth that must be restored. There is a way to live in the South that people do in fact find attractive.
Dolly Parton and Wendell Berry represented it. They were pioneers of it.
Real Things
Something about being close to the land, having a long memory, growing long roots, and most of all, loving valuable and tangible things. Dolly loved people. Berry loved land. This is different than the love of fleeting material possessions or abstract ideas.
Sure, things are watered down today. Cowboy boots and a pickup truck do not automatically confer tradition. But maybe they point to something that does. Maybe the emulation of Southern and traditional country forms points away from the gas station and toward the country store, away from the air-conditioned golf-course restaurant and toward the shack in the woods, away from the big megachurch and toward the small country church. You know the one, with the white steeple.
In a Platonic twist, the forms of a watered-down, non-threatening Dixie point to the real thing.
Listen to these lyrics from Dolly Parton’s hit “Tennessee Home”:
Walkin’ home from church on Sunday with the one ya love
Just laughin’, talkin’, making future plans
And when you see the folks ain’t lookin’
Well, you might steal a kiss or two
While you’re sittin’ in the porch swing, holdin’ hands
The song talks about things like fence posts, crickets, and songbirds. Real things. Things God made. And underlying all of it is a certain innocence. A mindset to keep private what ought to be private and enjoy what God made public for everyone. The best things are free.
The best way to understand Dolly Parton and Wendell Berry is to consider the environments that contributed to making them. The hills of Kentucky and mountains of Tennessee are still there. Their endearing qualities persist. Locals may be skeptics, but just take a trip to Boston and you will know what I mean.
The downside to the way people conceive of them, and perhaps at points they allowed this impression to take hold, is that their cheerful, attractive folkways could be separated from their more Christian roots. Without the Bible and their ties to the land and to each other, including their localist community instincts, they would have been different people. Berry was not really a Sierra Club environmentalist, and Dolly was not a typical rich celebrity.
What Comes Next
If both Southerners and outsiders can realize where the headwaters of this beautiful culture came from and trace it back, there is hope for Southern culture, even at this late hour. The bump in enthusiasm for homesteading, country music, and Christian governance signals that some people want roots. They do not want to be deracinated any longer.
If Southerners fail to make the connection between their unique culture and what made it that way, especially traditional and evangelical Christianity, they will continue to lose touch with their identity and become more and more similar to the standard American consumer.
Dolly Parton and Wendell Berry are examples of two Southerners who stayed Southern. But for them, it was not a choice during their formative years. Today, there is an endless array of choices at the touch of a screen. Young Southerners, if they are to represent their region and continue its unique ways, should follow the positive things found in the example of these two giants while self-consciously doing something they did not always do themselves: connecting those things to the foundation of their early environment, which is inseparable from church, the Bible, and Jesus Christ.
The views expressed at AbbevilleInstitute.org are not necessarily those of the Abbeville Institute.
I don’t know much about Berry. I do know quite a bit about Dolly though. While I loved her music and admired her business prowess and story, I became a little disenchanted with her when she took “Dixie” out of the stampede. It is these types of subtle attacks on my heritage that drives me to be ever more staunch in my fight. I can’t go along with your view of Dolly Parton being Southern. She has shown us her true colors.
I won’t miss either of them….
I think you do show a way forward, Jon. But we’ve got to stop allowing ourselves to be defined as “good Southerners” if we go along with what the mainstream says about us.
Berry’s principled and thoroughly rooted critique of crony capitalism showed the world that our choice is not confined to either capitalism or communism. The Southern tradition of human-scaled free enterprise remains a viable option. Berry’s agrarianism represents the original vision of Adam Smith, who described himself as an agrarian.
They were marginal Christians at best. Berry’s “contradictions” shows he didnt accept God’s word. And Dolly’s unwillingness to do what Christ called on all believers to do, which was fulfill the Great Commission, will be a mark of shame when she faces Jesus. As far as her Southerness, she was ashamed of it. You can not be Southern and hate Dixie. These are two people that, sadly, betrayed Southern beliefs. They may have been born here, but Southern values were surrendered for profit and popularity.