SSF Weekly Reflection #011 |Week Ending 30 August 2026
I was surprisingly saddened when I heard that Dolly Parton had died. It has made me think about Building Across Difference.
I say surprisingly because country music is not really my thing.
Or at least I don’t think it is.
And yet, as I listened to the tributes following her death, I realised that Dolly Parton had somehow woven herself into parts of my own life.
There are three songs I immediately associate with her: Islands in the Stream, I Will Always Love You and 9 to 5.
But it was Islands in the Stream that took me somewhere unexpected this week.
Belonging across difference begins with memory
When I was eight years old, I left Zimbabwe and came to live in the UK.
One of the people I left behind was my cousin.
We had grown up together and had been very close — the kind of childhood attachment that somehow survives separation, distance and time.
Many years later, he came to visit me in the UK.
And we sang together.
One of the songs he sang was Islands in the Stream, made famous by Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers.
He had grown up singing in church and had the most beautiful voice.
I can still hear it.
It is strange what happens when someone dies whom we have never met.
Their death can unlock memories that are not really about them at all.
Hearing about Dolly took me back to my cousin.
To childhood.
To Zimbabwe.
To separation and reunion.
To music.
And perhaps that is one clue to understanding the extraordinary reach of Dolly Parton.
How does a woman born into poverty in rural Tennessee become part of the emotional landscape of a Black Zimbabwean child who eventually grows up in Britain?
Perhaps music can sometimes do what human beings find much harder to do.
It crosses boundaries without first asking permission.
Dolly Parton, poverty and belonging across difference
The tributes also reminded me how much of Dolly’s story began with poverty.
She grew up as one of 12 children in rural Tennessee. Her childhood experiences later found their way into songs such as Coat of Many Colors — a story rooted in poverty, love, school and the humiliation of being mocked by other children because of what she was wearing. Dolly’s own website describes how the coat made for her from scraps became the subject of ridicule at school, even though to her it represented her mother’s love. Read the story behind Coat of Many Colors
I find that story psychologically interesting.
The same coat could mean two completely different things.
To the children who mocked it, it represented poverty and difference.
To Dolly, it represented love.
The object had not changed.
The lens had.
That is something I return to repeatedly within the Six Stages Framework.
So much of human behaviour depends not simply upon what is in front of us, but upon the meaning we attach to it.
What do we see when we encounter difference?
Something inferior?
Something threatening?
Something embarrassing?
Something to ridicule?
Or something we have not yet understood?
Belonging across difference does not require sameness
As I listened to people trying to explain why Dolly Parton seemed capable of being loved by people from extraordinarily different backgrounds, I kept returning to another thought.
Perhaps her ability to cross boundaries did not come from making herself less distinctive.
Quite the opposite.
Everything about Dolly Parton was distinctive.
The hair.
The clothes.
The rhinestones.
The voice.
The humour.
The faith.
The accent.
She seemed to understand the performance involved in being “Dolly Parton”, but there also seemed to be something underneath it that was remarkably secure.
She knew who she was.
She famously joked about the assumptions people made about her appearance. She could play with the image of the “dumb blonde” because she knew perfectly well that she was neither dumb nor naturally blonde.
That strikes me as important.
Because perhaps belonging across difference becomes easier when another person’s difference does not feel like a threat to our own identity.
We do not have to become the same.
I do not have to relinquish important parts of myself in order to make room for you.
And you do not have to become more like me before I can make room for you.
That feels increasingly important in a world in which differences of race, religion, sexuality, nationality and politics are so easily turned into dividing lines.
From childhood experience to action
Dolly’s response to poverty also did not stop at remembering that she had once been poor.
Her father had never learned to read and write. In 1995 she created Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, initially for children in the Tennessee county where she grew up. The programme was directly inspired by her father’s experience and eventually expanded internationally, sending millions of free books to young children.
There is something important here.
Experience can make us more compassionate.
But it does not automatically do so.
We can suffer and decide:
I survived it. Why can’t you?
Or we can suffer and ask:
What could I do so that somebody else does not have to experience what we experienced?
Those are very different psychological directions of travel.
One closes the door behind us.
The other holds it open.
What Dolly Parton understood about other people’s struggles
But perhaps even more significant is what happens when the experience is not ours.
Dolly knew poverty.
She knew what it was to be underestimated.
She knew what it was to be a woman navigating industries largely controlled by men.
But she did not know what it was to be Black.
And yet when asked about Black Lives Matter in 2020, she did not appear to require Black people to prove racism to her before she could recognise that something mattered.
She said she understood why people needed to make themselves “known and felt and seen” and unequivocally affirmed that Black lives matter. Read Dolly Parton’s comments on Black Lives Matter
I find those three words particularly powerful:
Known. Felt. Seen.
Because they are not simply political words.
They are psychological words.
They speak to recognition.
Visibility.
Humanity.
Belonging.
And perhaps this is where belonging across difference asks something more difficult of us.
It is relatively easy to empathise with somebody when their story resembles our own.
The greater psychological challenge may be:
Can I recognise your pain when I cannot use my own experience as the reference point?
Whitney Houston, Dolly Parton and something bigger than a song
And then there is I Will Always Love You.
Dolly originally wrote the song as a farewell to Porter Wagoner when she decided that she needed to leave their professional partnership and establish herself independently. Read the story of Dolly leaving The Porter Wagoner Show
Years later, Whitney Houston turned that song into one of the most recognisable recordings in the world.
Dolly earned substantial royalties from Whitney’s version.
What I had not known until recently was what Dolly subsequently said she had done with some of that money.
She invested in a commercial property in a predominantly Black area of Nashville and later spoke warmly about being among Whitney’s people, whom she regarded as her people too. She reportedly came to think of the investment as “the house that Whitney built.” Read about Dolly, Whitney Houston and the Nashville investment
There is something rather beautiful about that story.
A song written by a White woman in Tennessee.
Reimagined through the extraordinary voice of a Black woman from New Jersey.
Heard around the world.
And part of the financial success flowing from that collaboration eventually returned to a predominantly Black community.
I don’t want to romanticise that relationship or claim to know more about it than we do.
But I do think it illustrates something important.
Difference need not prevent connection, collaboration or reciprocity.
Through the SSF Lens: belonging across difference is movement
The Six Stages Framework asks us to think about human attitudes and behaviour as movement rather than fixed categories.
We can move towards greater curiosity, understanding, reflection, empathy, advocacy and transformational action.
We can also move in the other direction — towards avoidance, dismissal, hostility, blame, entrenched thinking and eventually more extreme forms of exclusion.
Dolly’s life should not be turned into an SSF score.
I am not interested in retrospectively assigning her a stage.
I am much more interested in the behaviours her life invites us to think about.
Listening.
Recognising.
Changing.
Giving.
Standing alongside people whose experiences are different from our own.
Being confident enough in who we are that somebody else’s identity does not diminish ours.
These are behaviours associated with movement towards greater inclusion and belonging.
They also connect with something I explored recently in my reflection on human encounters:
How do people feel after they encounter us?
More visible?
More accepted?
More able to be themselves?
Or smaller?
Defensive?
Judged?
Excluded?
Perhaps one of the reasons so many very different communities appear to have felt affection for Dolly Parton was that people experienced something in her public presence that communicated:
There is room here for you too.
Belonging across difference: perhaps that was the real gift
Dolly was described as a country music star.
A songwriter.
An actor.
A businesswoman.
A philanthropist.
An icon.
But perhaps the most interesting thing about the tributes is how many people seemed to experience her as something more personal.
Someone who could truly see them.
Someone who somehow belonged to them.
Black communities.
LGBTQ+ communities.
People growing up in poverty.
People of faith.
People with little interest in religion.
People on the political left.
People on the political right.
People in Tennessee.
And apparently at least two Black Zimbabwean cousins thousands of miles away.
What was it about her?
I am still thinking about that.
But perhaps part of the answer is this:
She seemed able to be unapologetically herself without requiring everybody else to be like her.
That is not a small thing.
Perhaps we sometimes misunderstand belonging.
We imagine that belonging comes from finding people who are like us.
Or, sometimes, from changing ourselves so that we fit more comfortably among them.
Sometimes it does.
But perhaps the deeper form of belonging is created when difference can remain present without becoming a condition for exclusion.
Not:
You belong because you are like me.
But:
You belong without having to be like me.
That distinction matters.
Because belonging is not the same as fitting in.
Fitting in may ask:
What do I need to change about myself to be accepted here?
Belonging asks something different:
Can I remain myself and still have a place here?
A final reflection on peace, difference and belonging
Dolly’s death also made me think about faith.
My own relationship with organised religion has changed considerably since my childhood. But I have never completely lost the sense that there may be something beyond us.
And listening again to some of Dolly’s spiritual music made me think about the human imagination of peace.
Many religious traditions imagine some form of place beyond this life in which suffering, hostility and division have ended.
Perhaps that is why I found myself smiling at the thought of Dolly being reunited with Carl Dean, her parents, Kenny Rogers — and perhaps somewhere, somehow, Whitney Houston — and music beginning again.
I don’t know what happens after we die.
None of us does.
But there is a question I cannot quite shake.
Why is the peaceful world we can so easily imagine after death sometimes so difficult for us to create while we are alive?
A world in which difference remains, but hostility does not.
A world in which identity remains, but superiority does not.
A world in which we can stand firmly in who we are while making room for somebody else to do the same.
Perhaps the deeper challenge is not simply learning to tolerate difference.
It is recognising the moments when somebody else’s identity, beliefs, culture or way of being begins to feel as though it threatens our own.
Why should your difference diminish my place in the world?
Why should my belonging require less of yours?
Perhaps that is one of the things Dolly Parton leaves us to think about.
Not simply how to be loved.
But how to make other people feel that there is room for them too.
And perhaps that is where belonging across difference really begins.
Reflective question
What would change in our families, workplaces, communities and societies if we stopped treating difference as something that had to be reduced before belonging could begin?
Part of the SSF Weekly Reflections series by Dr Shungu M’gadzah, exploring psychology, human behaviour, belonging, leadership and systems through the Six Stages Framework.
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