The tribute ended the way it had to. Carrie Underwood led the full cast of “CMA Presents I Will Always Love You: A Celebration of Dolly Parton” through the title song at Belmont University’s Fisher Center on Wednesday night, closing an evening in which Ella Langley sang “Jolene,” Ashley McBryde sang “Coat of Many Colors,” Reba McEntire sang with the Belmont Singers, and Zac Brown sang “Butterfly” as a duet with Parton herself. The special is now streaming on Disney+ and Hulu.
The morning after, the Country Music Association announced what the night had produced: a combined $1 million donation to Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library from the CMA, Belmont University, The Walt Disney Company, and the Nashville Convention & Visitors Corp. Four institutions that each touch a different part of Parton’s world, her industry, her city’s university, her broadcast partner, and her hometown’s front door, split one check for the cause she has funded longer than any of them.
“Dolly has always brought people together, and we built last night’s event with that same intention,” said CMA CEO Sarah Trahern. Brittany Schaffer, the CMA’s incoming CEO, called the evening a community uniting around “her legacy of love and literacy.”
The program the money feeds
The Imagination Library began in 1995 in Sevier County, Tennessee, where Parton grew up. Her father could not read or write, and she has never hidden that the program exists because of him. The mechanics are simple and stubborn: every enrolled child is mailed one age-appropriate book a month, addressed to the child, from birth to age five, at no cost to the family.
Thirty-one years on, the scale is not simple at all. The program has given away more than 300 million books across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and the Republic of Ireland, and it now mails more than 3 million books a month. The Dollywood Foundation runs the system, while thousands of local partners recruit families and cover the wholesale cost of books and postage in their own communities. A million dollars from one evening in Nashville buys a great many mailboxes’ worth of that.
It has been a generous season for education giving from big American brands, from Home Depot’s $200,000 grant to Elizabeth City State University to Disney’s share of this check. “Dolly knew that a single book could change the course of a child’s life,” said Belmont President Dr. Greg Jones. “As a university, we see every day how a love of learning opens doors and shapes who young people become.”
Why these four names are on the check
Each partner had a hand in the night itself. Belmont hosted it on its campus. Disney is carrying the special to the world on its streaming services. The Nashville Convention & Visitors Corp speaks for the city Parton did as much as anyone to put on the map. “She was one of Music City’s greatest ambassadors,” said its president and CEO, Deana Ivey, “introducing Nashville to fans around the world.”
Jeff Conyers, president of The Dollywood Foundation, accepted the gift on the program’s behalf and pointed it at the future. The test of the evening, in his framing, is not the applause but the arithmetic: a song catalog converted into reading children. Or, as Trahern put the destination of the money, it goes “so that children for years to come can open a mailbox and find a book with their name on it.”
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