You have read a lot about Dolly Parton this week.

You've read about the songs. “Jolene.” “9 to 5.” “Coat of Many Colors.” “I Will Always Love You.”

You've read about the movies, Dollywood, the rhinestones, the hair and the millions she gave away. The families she helped after the Gatlinburg wildfires. The million dollars she gave Vanderbilt researchers working on the COVID vaccine. The hospitals. The scholarships. The disaster relief.

She deserves every word of every tribute.

But this isn't another column about all of that.

Because there is something Dolly Parton did that may not have made the biggest headlines this week, something that doesn't sound as glamorous as a hit record or a presidential tribute, but may have changed more lives than any of them.

She put books in children's hands.

And if you've ever known an adult who couldn't read, really known one, you understand just how big a thing that is.

I used to teach adult literacy classes.

I met grown men and women who had gone through most of their lives unable to read.

Not unable to read well.

Unable to read.

And yet they survived.

They worked. They raised families. They bought groceries. They drove cars.

They learned how to get by.

A stop sign could be recognized by its shape and color. A familiar package on a grocery shelf could be identified without reading a word on it.

They memorized things. They watched what other people did. They developed little tricks to get through situations where somebody might ask them to read something.

Forgot my glasses.

Read that to me, would you?

They became experts at hiding it.

Because what I remember most was not the inconvenience of being unable to read.

It was the shame.

The shame of a grown person believing everybody else knew something they should have learned as a child.

The shame of spending a lifetime afraid somebody might find out.

Some carried that shame for decades.

Once you've seen that up close, you never look at a children's book quite the same way again.

Dolly's father, Lee Parton, could not read or write.

She has said his illiteracy was one of the reasons she started the Imagination Library in 1995 in Sevier County, Tennessee.

The idea was wonderfully simple.

Give children books.

Not once.

Every month.

Beginning at birth and continuing until they turned five.

Put the child's own name on the package and send it right to the house.

Think about that.

You're four years old.

The mail comes.

Most of it belongs to grownups.

But there's something in there with your name on it.

Your name.

You got mail.

And inside is a book.

Your book.

Nobody expects it back next Tuesday. It belongs to you.

You can hold it. Take it to bed. Ask Mama to read it again. Put it on a shelf beside the others.

Then another comes next month.

A child enrolled from birth can receive as many as 60 books before ever walking into kindergarten.

What started in one East Tennessee county has grown into something enormous.

Today, the Imagination Library sends more than 3 million books to children every month. More than 300 million books have been distributed since the program began.

Those numbers are staggering.

But I keep coming back to one child and one mailbox.

Because numbers don't quite explain what Dolly was really doing.

She was putting books into homes where there might not have been many books.

She was putting reading into a child's life before that child even understood what reading was.

She was telling a little boy in a Kentucky holler or a little girl in a Tennessee trailer that books belonged to them, too.

That matters in Appalachia.

Dolly couldn't erase poverty.

She couldn't fix every school.

She couldn't make every parent read aloud every night.

But she could put a book in the house.

Then she could do it again next month.

And the month after that.

The world will remember the voice, the songs, the big hair, the rhinestones and the jokes.

Appalachia ought to remember something else, too.

Somewhere, a child will walk to a mailbox and find a package with their own name on it.

They will tear it open.

There will be a book inside.

And because Dolly Parton understood something about poverty, pride, opportunity and the terrible shame that can follow a person who never learned to read, that child will have one more chance to start life differently.

God bless you, Dolly.

And thank you for the books.

Wayne Knuckles is a veteran of the newspaper industry and publisher of The Wayne Train. For more of his writings, subscribe today: www.thewaynetrain.com