Last night, I watched Straight Talk, the 1992 Dolly vehicle in which the singer plays, yes, a straight-talker from Arkansas who, through a series of highly predictable accidents, becomes Chicago’s biggest radio talk-show host, dishing out salty Dollyisms to the city’s brokenhearted.

Giddy with her sudden fame and riches, her character wants to buy champagne for an entire restaurant. “Money’s meant to be spent, right?” she coos to a love interest (James Woods! Of all people.) “What good’s it going to do anybody in the bottom of my panty drawer!”

For the country superstar, who died yesterday at 80, the wisecrack could have been a creed for her own life, one defined by extraordinary generosity and a fierce loyalty to the underdog.

Vaccine hero

As Covid tore through America, Dolly gave $1 million to Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, which worked with the drug company Moderna to develop its cutting-edge vaccine. “Dolly gets a dose of her own medicine,” she quipped in a tweet accompanying a video of her getting the jab, in which she urged others to follow suit and called those still resisting the shot “chicken squat.” She even sang a reworked version of her megahit “Jolene”:

“Vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, I’m begging of you please don’t hesitate.
Vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, ’cause once you’re dead then........

© Mother Jones