I can’t say that I was a student of Dolly’s music growing up, though I can attest to her power and presence in my life as a woman, singer and songwriter.

I was “gifted” — especially endowed, you could say — and thus, connected at the, ahem, heart. Dolly was a large-chested, buxom, blue-eyed, blonde sex symbol, and despite my best effort to evade being any kind of siren fantasy for men (or women), I was often compared to her.

We’re funny people. When we spot an archetype, we can’t help but type others. I get it, I’ve done it. And at times, I used Dolly as some sort of Sherpa spirit teaching me how to fawn, to squirrel out of misogynistic quips and to internally remind myself “the jokes on them.” She dubbed herself a “Backwoods Barbie” and wrote “don’t let these false eyelashes lead you to believe that I’m as shallow as I look ‘cause I run true and deep.”

Dolly has been subversively smashing patriarchy and racism through song telling and philanthropy for generations. If you were looking, if you needed a light or a crumb of glitter to follow, Dolly left them in every interview and every lyric, even if it was provocative.

She confounded me. Dolly was a lover of Jesus who also posed for Playboy in 1978, the year I was born. She hoisted her chest toward Heaven and arranged her face and body over and again throughout her life. Her actions seemed heretical to my Southern Baptist beliefs. Here was a “wonton, Jezebel woman” singing ‘He’s Alive!”

She continued to morph externally into a sparkly, glued, fringed, dyed and sprayed form of a female. This is why the drag queens loved her. She seemed to mock and play with forms of femininity that were unnatural; giving it to the world in such a way that said, “So this is what you want from a woman? Anyone can become this.” The joke was on the world, on the ones longing to consume and exploit, but not on her.

Headed up to the Smoky Mountains a couple of years ago, I listened to the “Dolly Parton’s America” podcast. She spoke of a church in the Tennessee hills where she used to go to sing, pray and meet with Jesus.

This wasn’t any church though — it was an abandoned sanctuary where wayward souls went to drink, drug and fornicate. Dolly loved the juxtaposition. She felt this place was safe for the wideness of her sexual expression and the witness of Jesus. Graffiti lined walls provided her a sort of education of the world and the power of God’s grace.

Dolly knew deeply that The Gospel was for everyone and grace was truly for the least of us. This abandoned church held the ache of her heart, and she tried to live a life worthy of its welcome.

I found a vintage Dolly tee in the mid ’90s which only means it was already old when I was in high school. The plastic silver scripted “Dolly” clung and melted to the cotton fibers.

I still have it, but the red capped baseball sleeves have weathered to orange and Dolly’s seemingly immortal face is fading. I remember buying it because I identified with her, ahem, big-hearted image, not because I was a true Dolly music lover. I still don’t know all of her music, and something about her twinge and twang used to bother me.

She embraced her roots so fully while I often tried to outrun mine. Dolly gave me a way back home. Watching her sing, no matter how country or corny the sound, her sincerity and conviction exposed then softened my bias.

I don’t think Dolly was perfect. I think she was a human who kept trying to connect: with God, herself, her family, with strangers; connect ideas to action, faith to works, music with lyrics and people to each other. She loved polarity and was a bridge lit up like a Dollywood roller coaster…if you wanted to get to the other side she could deliver you there but not without cacklin’, cryin’, hollerin’ and a whole lotta fun. She found amusement in the absurdity of life to create a space where we could all come together. Dolly, and her legacy, is indeed a space for love.