Gary Hayes

Dolly Parton, what a wholesome and wholly amazing woman. Visiting Ireland, she popped into a pub owned by Kerry Gaelic football legend Páidí Ó Sé. She came for a pint but ended up singing - her Coat of Many Colours, which told the story of growing up in poverty in a Smoky Mountains village.  She was born in 1946, as much the rest of the world entered an unprecedented period of postwar prosperity - less so if you were one of 14 siblings born in a log cabin to a sharecropper who had never learnt to read. And she gave so much of her money from music away - 100 million books, in honour of her father. One book a month to children participating in her Imagination Library, not only in the US but Canada, the UK, Australia, and even here in Ireland. She campaigned strongly for gay rights, speaking out for same sex marriage from 2009 - not everyone in country music did.  Her humour was self-deprecating and relentless. ‘I am a self-made woman, and I have the doctor bills to prove it’ was typical. (As was ‘I was the first woman to burn my bra—it took the fire department four days to put it out.’). But even popping out for a quiet pint in the middle of Kerry she looked a million dollars - and was intensely aware of the shared musical past linking Appalachia and here. Hers, she said, was ‘Smokey Mountain DNA, but is from those old songs brought over from Ireland and England.’ Some woman. Ar dheis Dé go raibh a hanam. – at Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown, Ireland