Dolly Parton tells Tennessee lawmakers to stop trying to build statue of her

Country music icon Dolly Parton said Thursday she had asked Tennessee lawmakers to withdraw their bill to erect a statue of her on the grounds of the state capital in Nashville.

“Considering everything that’s going on in the world, I don’t think putting myself on a pedestal is appropriate right now,” Parton said on Twitter.

Parton, 75, added that she was ready to be honored with a statue in Music City “somewhere down the road in several years or maybe after I leave if you still think I deserve it.”

“In the meantime, I will continue to try to do a good job to make this great state proud,” the statement said.

A life-size statue of the nine-time Grammy winner is already on display in Sevierville, Tennessee, Parton’s hometown.

In recent years, statues have been at the center of unstable and divisive political debates over which Americans should be honored in public and whether statues of figures with racist or otherwise controversial backgrounds should be demolished.

But the bill to immortalize Parton in Nashville, proposed by Democratic State Representative John Mark Windle, received broad bipartisan support from the heavily Republican Tennessee General Assembly.

Windle in a recent interview with the Chattanooga Times Free Press said he was “shocked” by the response his bill generated.

The Tennesseans “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 selflessly.”

Parton has a strong history of philanthropy in the State and beyond. Its “Imagination Library” program, launched in 1995, sends free books to children every month.

After the 2016 Tennessee wildfires destroyed scores of homes, Parton pledged to donate $ 1,000 per month to every family left homeless for six months.

Last April, Parton donated $ 1 million to Vanderbilt University Medical Center to aid in its efforts to fight the coronavirus pandemic, including Moderna’s vaccine trial.