When Robert Lee Parton died in 2000, the illiterate former sharecropper asked his large musical family to sing "If We Never Meet Again (This Side of Heaven)," his favorite country-gospel song.
"If we never meet again this side of heaven / As we struggle through this world and its strife / There's another meeting place somewhere in heaven / By the river of life," they sang.
Recalling that family salute to the eternal ties that bind led his daughter Dolly Parton to ask that Albert E. Brumley's hymn be sung, once again, at her private Aug. 28 funeral.
Celebrating the country music legend is an honor "mixed with absolute pride and great sadness," stressed Bryan Seaver, the son of Parton's sister Cassie Parton, in the family's announcement of her death.
"But sadness lies with us, not with Dolly," said Seaver, who served as Parton's security director and also spoke at her funeral. "Dolly has lived in the light and is in the arms of Jesus. Surely met by Carl, her parents and countless others who have watched her and longed for her to meet them in the heavens."
Like her nearly 59-year marriage to construction worker Carl Dean, Parton's faith was something she never hid, but the details were mysterious enough to cause chatter.
"Very few artists ‒ outside of strictly gospel ‒ are able to clearly articulate the relationship between their music and their faith," said Steve Beard, a contributor to "Spiritual Journeys," a book about the spiritual lives of musical icons. But one thing is certain, he said, via email: "Dolly was raised to believe in and preach a God of love. She would be quick to point that out and leave the fine and important details of theology to eternity."
Parton grew up in mountain churches, with a grandfather who was a fire-and-brimstone Pentecostal preacher and ties to Robert F. Thomas, a Methodist missionary doctor who delivered many babies ‒ including Parton, the fourth of 12 children, in the family's one-bedroom cabin.
In her 1994 autobiography, Parton said she never lost her faith, but it certainly evolved: "One day as I prayed in earnest, I broke through some sort of spirit wall and found God. … Not as a chastising, bombastic bully but as a friend I could talk to on a one-to-one basis."
In her 2020 book "Dolly Parton, Songteller" she continued to dodge easy labels: "I'm not that religious, but I'm very, very spiritual. I grew up in very religious surroundings. I grew up with a Bible background, and I'm glad I did. I know my Bible stories."
Throughout her career, Parton began her day with private prayers and Bible study. This affected her work while writing 3,000 songs: "I feel like I'm closest to God when I write. I have to leave myself open for the songs to come in or go out."
In the title track of "Horns and Halos," the 2002 release that closed a trilogy of bluegrass discs examining her roots, she offered this blunt summary of her journey: "Tempted and tried with each step we take / We stumble and slide and make our mistakes / Ask God to forgive us for all of our sins / Then we take off our horns and wear halos again.
"Halos and horns, sinners and saints / Hearts that are torn between what's wrong and ain't / Just because it feels right does not make it so / So we struggle through life in horns and halos."
Parton's faith language often left her critics and admirers puzzled. In the 2019 WNYC series "Dolly Parton's America," she described eternity with folksy Christian images, including harps, mansions and "golden streets of glory." Then, in the same podcast, she hinted at reincarnation: "I think we're recycled and if nothing else, we just go back into that great flow of divine energy."
Truth is, Parton often used different images with different audiences.
Also, noted Hollywood writer-producer Rob Long in a 2020 Commentary essay, many journalists seemed to find her fervent faith "weird and baffling. They keep asking, 'How does she do it?' And she keeps answering them, 'By writing songs that are emotionally true and not being a political activist and praying for God's guidance.' And they just don't hear it. Can't be that. Gotta be something else."
Terry Mattingly is Senior Fellow on Communications and Culture at Saint Constantine College in Houston. He lives in Elizabethton, Tennessee, and writes Rational Sheep, a Substack newsletter on faith and mass media.
This article originally appeared on Knoxville News Sentinel: Making sense of Dolly Parton's spiritual legacy | Mattingly
