Dolly Parton asks the state of Tennessee not to waste time putting up a statue of her
It’s been a while since The A.V. Club covered terrible statues meant to commemorate famous people, either because the world’s statue designers have all been fired for being terrible or because we ran out of ways to say “well, this looks like shit and we now feel bad for Lucille Ball or Cristiano Ronaldo.” Today, though, Dolly Parton decided to get out ahead of efforts to turn her into a terrible statue by reminding the Tennessee state legislature that there are, you know, more important things going on than deciding if she deserves to be immortalized in the State Capitol.
Parton reminded the world of her effortless coolness with a post on Twitter, saying she was “honored and humbled” by the idea of Tennessee putting up a statue of her, but she’d like them to drop it. She says it wouldn’t be “appropriate at this time” to consider putting her “on a pedestal” with “all that is going on in the world.” That being said, she does note that she’d be more than happy to let them consider it again “several years from now” or after she dies.
As for why Parton might deserve a statue in the first place, other than the fact that she rules, she did spend 2020 openly supporting the Black Lives Matter movement and donating a ton of money to help develop one of the COVID-19 vaccines—and that’s in addition to all of the charity work she does during a “normal” year. Those reminders of her general goodness coincided with a movement to tear down a bunch of statues put up by racists, so replacing even one of those would help to recalibrate the moral balance of the world. That all being said, she does already have a statue in Tennessee, so if you’re really desperate to see a version of her that doesn’t move or sing or… donate money to develop vaccines or promote child literacy, you’ve got options.