There are singers we listen to, and there are singers who take us somewhere.
Dolly Parton was one of those singers for me. I had her albums and loved that unmistakable voice, but it was the storytelling within her music that stayed with me. She could take experiences that were deeply personal and make them recognisable to people whose lives may have looked completely different from her own.
Perhaps that is where her educational value begins.
Dolly did not simply tell us what happened. Through story, she invited us to think about what experience means. Her songs opened conversations about poverty and class, shame and dignity, work and power, jealousy and vulnerability, love, loss and letting go. She gave language to experiences people sometimes struggle to articulate for themselves.
And her commitment to education extended beyond her songwriting. Through the Imagination Library, she turned a belief in literacy and opportunity into something tangible, putting books into the hands of children and encouraging a relationship with reading from an early age.
So, when I think about Dolly Parton, I find myself thinking about her not only as a singer, songwriter, and storyteller, but as an educationalist.
And of all her songs, it is Coat of Many Colours that takes me somewhere deeper.
When the story changes, the meaning can change.
A child. A family without much money. A mother stitching together pieces of cloth to make her daughter a coat.
Other children see poverty.
The child has been taught to see love.
That distinction matters.
The circumstances themselves have not changed. The family is still poor. The coat is still made from scraps. The teasing still happens.
What changes is the meaning attached to the experience.
For those of us interested in counselling and psychotherapy, there is something powerful here about narrative. People do not simply bring events into the counselling room. They bring the meanings that have gathered around those events: meanings shaped by childhood, family, culture, relationships, and the responses of other people.
Sometimes therapeutic work allows another telling to emerge.
That does not mean rewriting history or pretending something painful was not painful. It means becoming curious about whether the meaning we have carried is the only meaning available to us.
A coat made from scraps can signify poverty.
It can also signify love.
Both can be true.
Giving emotion a language
Then there is Jolene.
Jealousy. Fear. Vulnerability. The possibility of losing someone we love.
These are not particularly comfortable emotions. We often prefer the versions of ourselves that feel generous, secure, and composed.
Dolly puts something much less tidy before us.
She did not hide emotion. She translated it.
That is where Jolene becomes interesting educationally.
Emotional literacy is not simply knowing the names of feelings. It involves becoming able to recognise what is happening within us, tolerate it and communicate something about it without immediately needing to defend against it.
For counselling students, that matters.
Before we can sit comfortably with the emotional worlds of other people, we must develop a greater capacity to recognise our own including the feelings we might not admit are there.
Sometimes a song gives us a safer doorway into that conversation.
What 9 to 5 teaches beyond the individual?
Then Dolly gives us something entirely different.
9 to 5 is bright, funny, and almost impossible not to move to.
Yet underneath that energy is a story about work.
Routine. Power. Gender. Money. Frustration. Ambition. The experience of giving your labour within a structure in which somebody else appears to hold more power than you do.
And that matters in counselling education because distress does not exist only inside people.
Clients bring their workplaces into the counselling room.
They bring financial pressures.
Caring responsibilities.
Class.
Gender.
Discrimination.
Opportunity—or the absence of it.
Power.
If we understand every difficulty solely as an individual psychological problem, we risk asking “What is wrong with this person?” when another important question might be:
What is happening around this person?
Dolly could make people tap their feet while telling a story about inequality.
That is not merely clever song writing. It is another way of making a social experience visible.
When love and leaving occupy the same room
And then there is I Will Always Love You.
What interests me about Dolly’s writing here is not simply that the song became enormously successful when Whitney Houston later interpreted it.
It is the emotional proposition underneath it.
A relationship can end without somebody having to become the villain.
Love and leaving are allowed to coexist.
Something can have mattered deeply and still need to finish. We can retain affection for someone while recognising that remaining together is no longer right.
That gives us another useful lesson about human emotion.
We can love and be angry.
Grieve and feel relieved.
Want to stay and know we need to leave.
Miss somebody and know that returning would not be right.
Human emotions rarely arrive neatly, one at a time.
Emotional maturity involves developing the capacity to hold contradictory truths without forcing one of them to disappear.
When the body hears before the mind explains
And then there are songs such as Islands in the Stream.
Whenever I hear it, I get goose pimples.
But so what?
Why should that matter?
Perhaps because sometimes our bodies respond before we have found the words to explain the response.
A piece of music plays.
Something shifts.
A memory appears. An emotion rises. We feel warmth, sadness, longing, or connection before we have consciously decided to feel any of those things.
For counselling students, that is worth noticing too.
Not every piece of information arrives through language.
We notice the tightening of a chest.
A change in breathing.
A sudden smile.
Tears that seem to arrive before the story does.
The body sometimes tells us that something matters before the thinking mind has caught up.
My goose pimples are not the lesson.
Becoming curious about them is.
Going to the basement
At Reflect On Academy, I sometimes talk about going to the basement.
It is my way of describing what happens when we move beneath the first answer, the polished explanation, or the story we have learned to tell and become curious about what might be underneath.
Only certain singers take me there.
Dolly was one.
Perhaps that was because she could hold complexity without making it inaccessible.
There could be poverty without reducing people to poverty.
Vulnerability without weakness.
Social criticism alongside humour.
Loss alongside love.
There could be colour.
There could be enormous hair.
There could be laughter.
And still there could be truth.
May be, that what Dolly Parton offers us as an educationalist.
Not answers.
Ways of noticing.
Her songs invite us to notice the stories people construct around their lives, the meanings attached to experience, the emotions hidden beneath more acceptable ones, the social conditions surrounding individual distress and the things our bodies sometimes know before we can put them into words.
Those are significant lessons for anyone learning to sit alongside another human being.
Sometimes education comes through theory.
Sometimes it comes through conversation.
And sometimes, if we listen closely enough, it comes through a song.
