Dolly Parton, who died Tuesday at 80 at her home south of Nashville, wrote two of the most durable songs in American music — “Jolene” and “I Will Always Love You” — and then spent six decades proving that the woman who wrote them was even more remarkable than the songs. Her family announced the death through her official Instagram, in a video from her nephew Bryan Seaver. No cause was given. She had told PEOPLE three days earlier that she was dealing with health issues she had put off while her husband, Carl Thomas Dean, was ill before his death last year.
The tributes today will be national, and they should be. But there is a smaller story worth telling from up here, and it runs longer than most people realize: Dolly Parton came to upstate New York for forty-eight years. At least sixteen documented times, from a fairground stage in Syracuse to an amphitheater above the Niagara Gorge. She played our arenas, our restored downtown theaters, a casino event center, and — twice — a county fair. She kept coming back long after she had any commercial reason to.
The fairgrounds years
The first documented night is Monday, September 2, 1968 — Labor Day, closing day of the New York State Fair — at the Entertainment Center on the Syracuse fairgrounds. She was 22, a year into Porter Wagoner’s touring show, still several years from “Jolene.” Four summers later, on July 29, 1972, she played the Clinton County Fairgrounds in Morrisonville, about as far north as a country act could go and still be in New York. That is a detail worth sitting with. Before she was Dolly Parton the institution, she was a working singer taking a North Country fair date in late July.
Then the halls got bigger. The Onondaga County War Memorial in Syracuse on November 21, 1975. Kleinhans Music Hall in Buffalo on November 7, 1976 — Buffalo’s grandest room, given over for a night to a girl from Sevier County, Tennessee, who was the fourth of twelve children.
The best-documented night of that era survives not as a recording but as a piece of paper. An original handbill for her August 13, 1977 show at Rochester’s Auditorium Theatre lists a Saturday, 8:00 p.m. curtain and reserved seats at $5.50, $6.50 and $7.50. Tickets were available at the box office, at Record Theatre locations, and at the House of Guitars. Boylan Productions promoted it. You can read the whole economics of 1977 regional touring off that single sheet.
She came to Saratoga Performing Arts Center twice — August 14, 1979 and August 31, 1983 — the second on the last night of August, when the Saratoga season is winding down and the lawn is the best seat in the state.
The Dome, and the eighties
December 2, 1985 brought her to the Broome County Veterans Memorial Arena in Binghamton. In May 1988 she was booked for two nights at Melody Fair in North Tonawanda, the round room Western New York still misses. Both nights were cancelled, and she never did play the round room.
But six months later came the biggest room she ever played upstate. On Saturday, November 26, 1988 — two days after Thanksgiving — Parton appeared at the Carrier Dome in Syracuse on a bill with Kenny Rogers and The Oak Ridge Boys. The surviving setlist is incomplete and out of order, but it is enough: “Two Doors Down,” “Jolene,” “Coat of Many Colors,” “Here You Come Again,” “9 to 5,” “Smoky Mountain Memories,” “Applejack.” Country music filling a domed football stadium in central New York in 1988 was not a small thing, and she was the reason.
The nineties brought her back to rooms that suited her better. The Landmark Theatre in Syracuse on June 20, 1992, and Rochester’s Eastman Theatre on March 14, 1993.
Then the modern run: the Pepsi Arena in Albany on November 17, 2004, on the Hello, I’m Dolly tour, in the building Albany has also known as the Knickerbocker Arena, the Times Union Center and, now, MVP Arena. Turning Stone in Verona on November 18, 2006 — the only New York date of that entire tour — and again, on the same November 18 date, in 2009. Binghamton got her one more time on April 26, 2008.
Artpark, and the last time
The final upstate performance was Sunday, June 12, 2016, opening Artpark’s season in Lewiston on the Pure & Simple Tour — her twelfth and last headlining tour, billed as her first major run through the United States and Canada in more than 25 years. She was 70 years old. She played for two full sets and did not coast.
Parton explains how she wrote “Jolene,” then plays it at Artpark. Video: NFP Staffers / Niagara Frontier Publications.
We know exactly what she played, because the setlist survives and so does the video. She opened with “Hello Dolly” and worked through “Jolene,” “My Tennessee Mountain Home,” “Coat of Many Colors,” “Smoky Mountain Memories,” “Applejack,” “Rocky Top,” “The Grass Is Blue,” “Little Sparrow,” “Here You Come Again,” “Islands in the Stream” and “9 to 5.” She worked the Benny Hill theme into “Rocky Top” — someone filmed it, and you can still watch her, at 70, playing the fool on purpose for a hillside of Western New Yorkers because she thought it was funny. Then she came back and closed the night with “I Will Always Love You.”
Playing the fool on purpose, at 70, in Lewiston. Video: Samantha Christmann.
That is the last time Dolly Parton sang in New York State. It is a good last time.
What she left here
There is one more upstate fact, and it is the one that matters most.
In 1995 Parton founded the Imagination Library to honor her father, Robert Lee Parton, who could not read or write. It mails a free book every month to every enrolled child from birth to age five, regardless of what the family earns. It has now given away more than 250 million books.
Last October, the New York State Library awarded $499,149 to expand that program across this state — 25 local programs run by 20 organizations, in grants from $2,500 to $49,000. The counties on that list include Onondaga. Monroe. Erie. Oneida. Broome. Chautauqua, Allegany, Wayne, Jefferson, Oswego.
Read that list again against the venues. Onondaga is the State Fair, the War Memorial, the Carrier Dome, the Landmark. Monroe is the Auditorium Theatre and the Eastman. Erie is Kleinhans. Oneida is Turning Stone. Broome is Binghamton.
She is still arriving in the same counties she used to play — Central New York, Western New York, the Finger Lakes, the Capital Region. Every month, by mail, to four-year-olds who will never know they got a package from her.
She gave a million dollars to Vanderbilt for coronavirus research that helped fund the early work on Moderna’s vaccine, and said she just wanted “to do good.” After the 2016 Smoky Mountain wildfires she sent $1,000 a month for six months to every family whose home had burned — about $8.9 million. She won the Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy. She was funny in a way that never once punched down, and honorable in a way that made the rest of the industry look small.
Forty-eight years. Sixteen nights we can document, from a Labor Day fairground to a June hillside above the gorge. Upstate New York got a lot of Dolly Parton, and we should count ourselves lucky.
