Dolly Parton backs our campaign: ‘If only Daddy had learnt to read’

In an age when so much of our public life feels loud, hurried, and disposable, Dolly Parton has chosen to stand beside something quietly revolutionary: a child, a lap, and a book.

Long before the rhinestones, the stadium lights, and the title “Queen of Country,” she was a girl in a small Tennessee cabin, one of 12 children, growing up with a single book in the home—the family Bible. It’s a detail that lands with extra weight when you hear what came next: the man she called the smartest she ever knew—her father, Robert Lee—could not read or write. Not because he lacked intelligence, but because opportunity never found its way to his hands.

That ache—what might have been, if only he’d had the key to words—became the seed for something larger than any record sale. Through the Imagination Library, Parton built a simple promise: every month, from birth to age five, a book arrives at a child’s home. No tests. No shame. No gatekeeping. Just a steady message, delivered in cardboard and ink: You belong in the world of stories.

In the UK, that promise has been quietly unfolding since 2007. Millions of children’s books—more than seven million—have found their way into living rooms, kitchens, and bedrooms, month after month, year after year. The numbers are impressive, yes. But what’s more moving is the picture behind them: a parent reading aloud on a tired weeknight; a child tracing letters with a small finger; a household discovering that reading isn’t an “activity,” but a shared life.

Now, Parton is lending her voice to The Sunday Times Get Britain Reading campaign, joining a chorus of public figures urging families to make reading a daily habit again—ten minutes a day, for six weeks, simply for pleasure. It’s not framed as homework. It’s framed as refuge. As connection. As a small, repeatable act that can soften the hard edges of modern childhood.

Parton’s own words about her father do not feel like celebrity messaging—they feel like a daughter speaking across time. She has described the programme as a tribute to him, and admitted she believes his inability to read likely kept him from fulfilling all his dreams. That line doesn’t accuse; it mourns. And in that mourning, it builds a bridge—because so many families, in every postcode, know what it means to carry unrealised potential simply because life was unfairly arranged.

The programme’s mechanics are reassuringly practical. In the UK, families register, and a first book arrives—often a classic such as The Tale of Peter Rabbit—followed by carefully selected, age-appropriate titles curated with partners like Penguin Random House. Local partnerships help fund delivery, while the Dollywood Foundation covers administrative costs, keeping the model steady and scalable.

And then there’s the evidence—always important for readers who want hope to be more than sentiment. Research associated with the programme, drawing on tens of thousands of parents across multiple countries, suggests participating children are far more likely to spend time reading on their own. That matters because independent reading is not only a skill; it’s a form of confidence. A child who opens a book alone is a child who believes they can make sense of the world.

This campaign also arrives at a worrying cultural moment. National Literacy Trust data has indicated that only about one in three young people say they enjoy reading in their free time. In response, policymakers and experts are again asking what happens to a society when reading becomes rare—not just the ability to decode words, but the habit of sustained attention, empathy, and inner life.

Parton, who has said she returns to the Bible again and again (a reflection she once shared in conversation with New York Public Library), is not offering a trendy fix. She’s offering continuity: the same faith that formed her childhood, translated into a modern act of public care.

In the end, Get Britain Reading isn’t really about celebrities—though supporters include names as varied as Mick Jagger, Gareth Southgate, David Nicholls, Ian McEwan, and Freida McFadden. It’s about what happens when reading becomes “shared, everyday family life”—the phrase echoed by Dollywood Foundation UK leaders supporting the effort.

A book a month won’t solve every inequality. But it can do something quietly profound: it can place possibility on the doorstep of a child who might otherwise never meet it. And sometimes, that is how a country changes—not in a single speech, but in a thousand living rooms, where someone opens a cover and says, “Come here. Let me read this to you.”