Dolly Parton on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon.
NBCU
Country music icon Dolly Parton said Thursday that she asked Tennessee lawmakers to withdraw her bill to erect a statue of her on Nashville State Capitol grounds.
“Given everything that’s happening in the world, I don’t think being on a pedestal right now is appropriate right now,” Parton said on Twitter.
Parton, 75, added that she is open to being honored with a statue in Music City “somewhere on the road in a few years from now or maybe after I leave if you still feel I deserve it.”
“In the meantime, I will continue to try to do a good job to make this great state proud,” she said.
A life-size statue of the new Grammy winner is already on display in Sevierville, Tennessee, which is Parton’s hometown.
Statues in recent years have been at the center of volatile and divisive political debates about which Americans should be honored in the public square and whether statues of figures with racist or otherwise controversial pasts should be demolished.
But the bill to immortalize Parton in Nashville, proposed by Democratic Rep. John Mark Windle, has received widespread bipartisan support from the Republican General Assembly in Tennessee.
Windle, in a recent interview with Chattanooga Times Free Press, said he was “shocked” by the response to his bill.
Tennessees “love Dolly Parton, not just because she’s a great musician,” Windle said. “She is a caring, compassionate person and just a decent person. She takes care of her community, she takes care of her condition. And she does it with altruism.”
Parton has a strong history of philanthropy in the state and beyond. Her “Library of Imagination” program, started in 1995, sends free books to children every month.
After the 2016 fires in Tennessee destroyed many homes, Parton pledged to donate $ 1,000 a month to each family left without a place to live for six months.
In April last year, Parton donated $ 1 million to Vanderbilt University Medical Center to help it in its efforts to fight the coronavirus pandemic, including the Moderna vaccine study.