Dolly Parton’s Other Legacy: A Fortune Given Away, Dollar by Dollar

When fires swept through the Great Smoky Mountains in 2016, killing 14 and displacing thousands, a local legend answered the call to help.

Dolly Parton, the country music luminary, who died this week at 80, offered $1,000 per month to families who had lost their homes in Sevier County. The money kept flowing for months, and the songwriter and star behind hits including “My Tennessee Mountain Home” ultimately sent $12.5 million back to the county where she was born.

Ms. Parton’s support for the fire victims was just one node in a constellation of charitable activities that distinguished her as one of pop culture’s most prolific philanthropists. With cash gifts, benefit concerts and telethons, Parton supported causes that included early childhood literacy, wildlife conservation and the development of the Covid-19 vaccine.

She became so effective at distributing her own money that the ultrawealthy asked her to distribute theirs. In 2022, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and his future wife, Lauren Sanchez, gave Ms. Parton $100 million to distribute to causes of her choosing. And this summer, Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce gave Ms. Parton’s Imagination Library $2 million to fund the distribution of children’s books.

“Her philanthropy was so much more significant and serious than what you see from other celebrities,” said Stacy Palmer, chief executive of the Chronicle of Philanthropy. “As a woman, she was a standout giver, and she gave to the kinds of causes that a lot of rich people don’t give to, ones that were based on her life experience.”

Ms. Parton started her own charitable organization, the Dollywood Foundation, in 1988, the same year that “Trio,” her album with Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstadt, won album of the year at the Academy of Country Music Awards.

The foundation was initially focused on reducing school dropout rates in Sevier County, in part by offering $500 gifts to graduates. Cold, hard cash proved a powerful incentive; high school dropout rates plummeted to just 6 percent in the county, from 35 percent. The Dollywood Foundation, which reported $141 million in blockets last year, also offers local high school graduates $15,000 scholarships.

“She gave cash gifts to people in need long before it was popular,” Ms. Palmer said. “She trusted the people that she wanted to help.”

At her theme park, Dollywood, Ms. Parton opened a special attraction: a 30,000-square-foot aviary to house rehabilitated bald eagles that could not be released into the wild.

In 1995, Ms. Parton started the Imagination Library, a program that sent one book per month to children in Sevier County from birth until their first year of school. The inspiration for the effort came from Parton’s father, who didn’t know how to read.

“As we see all these super-wealthy people thinking about strategic plans, her brilliance was just making it so easy for people to read,” Ms. Palmer said. “Send them the book.”

The program expanded across the world, and last year, the Imagination Library said it had distributed some 305 million books.

“I just give from my heart,” Parton said in 2022, when accepting the Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy in New York. “I never know what I’m going to do or why I’m gonna do it. I just see a need and if I can fill it, then I will.”

Parton often saw need in the aftermath of disasters. After Hurricane Helene cut a swath of devastation across the Southeast, she personally donated $1 million to the Mountain Ways Foundation to support flood victims, while her businesses and the Dollywood Foundation pledged $1 million more.

She announced her gift in a Walmart parking lot in Newport, Tennessee, not far from where she was born, and sang a Hurricane Helene-themed version of her clblockic song “Jolene” to the crowd.

“There’s any number of celebrities who could give money after disasters, and don’t,” said David Callahan, the founder of Inside Philanthropy, a news site that writes about charitable giving. “But she had a powerful sense of empathy.”

In the months after the Covid-19 virus emerged, Parton learned that Vanderbilt University in Nashville was helping with the early trials of the vaccine made by Moderna, and gave $1 million to support the effort.

“It was a shot in the arm,” said Mark Denison, emeritus professor of pediatrics at the Vanderbilt School of Medicine. “We were starting this work but we didn’t have specific funding for it, and she recognized that this was a critical human problem that was going to impact the country and the world. It allowed us to quickly scale up and get into the lab.”

For the staff at Vanderbilt, her gift was also an enormous morale booster.

“We’re all in Nashville, and there were some people who were serious fans,” Dr. Denison said. “The fact that she was supporting our work was something that you could not put a price on.”

The next year, she made a $1 million gift to Vanderbilt to support work on infectious diseases in children, and the year after that, she created an endowment to support additional research.

“This is an area that is undersupported and not really popular for charity,” Dr. Denison said. “But she was really good at recognizing short-term needs but maintaining a long-term vision.”

In 2021, Dr. Denison and his wife had dinner with Ms. Parton. Over the three-hour meal, she mostly asked questions about their work and why they had chosen their careers, he said. Dr. Denison has traded on the story ever since.

“I got more credibility with my family and friends from that one interaction than I did from 40 years of research,” he said.

Ms. Parton’s support for medical issues went well beyond the Covid-19 vaccine.

In 2007, she performed at a benefit concert for a new hospital in Sevier County, and the Dollywood Foundation donated funds for the new building as well. When the hospital opened in 2010, it featured a 30,000-square-foot Dolly Parton Center for Women’s Services.

In 2017, following the release of a children’s album, “I Believe in You,” Parton donated $1 million to the Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. The gift was made in honor of her niece, who was treated for leukemia at that hospital.

In February, officials at the East Tennessee Children’s Hospital in Knoxville renamed it the Dolly Parton Children’s Hospital after receiving what they called a “generational commitment” from Ms. Parton. The amount has not been disclosed.

“Sometimes philanthropists have tons of fund-raisers who come to them and say, ‘Put your name on this building, do this important thing, and it’ll get you access to a museum or the other people you want to hang out with,’” Ms. Palmer said. “She just never really forgot about the roots that she grew up in, and this obligation she felt to the people who helped her thrive in life.”

Ms. Palmer said the question now was what will become of Ms. Parton’s remaining fortune, which is estimated to be about $500 million, according to Forbes.

“She did so much while she’s alive, but I’m super curious what her will says,” Ms. Palmer said. “Because she had so much wealth, and she did not have children. So we may yet see more of her.”