How Dolly Parton inspired Jewish bedtime stories

When Dolly Parton was a little girl growing up in a one-room cabin in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee, her mother sewed her a coat from rags. To make her daughter proud of it, she told her the story of Joseph and his coat of many colours.

“In my mind, I thought I looked just like Joseph,” Parton later recalled in her memoir Songteller. “But the kids didn’t, and it crushed me.”

That childhood memory became one of Parton’s most beloved songs, Coat of Many Colors. 

Parton died on August 25 at her home in Nashville. She was 80.

Her nephew Bryan Seaver announced her death in a video posted to her social media accounts, saying Parton died “peacefully”. In lieu of flowers, the family asked that donations be made to Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, the children’s literacy program she founded in 1995.

Parton is being mourned worldwide for a musical career that spanned more than five decades. But for the Jewish community, there is an extra layer to the loss. PJ Library, the program that sends free Jewish children’s books to some 670,000 young readers in 40 countries each month, including thousands of families in Australia, would not exist without her.

It started with a radio interview. In 2005, Harold Grinspoon, a Massachusetts real estate entrepreneur, heard Parton talking about the Imagination Library. She had launched the program a decade earlier, sending free books each month to children in Sevier County, Tennessee, her childhood home, because her own father had never learned to read or write. By the time Grinspoon heard her on the radio, it had grown far beyond those mountains.

Parton talked about wanting every child to grow up in a home full of books. Grinspoon kept listening.

He had been thinking about Jewish literacy for a while. Young Jewish families were drifting from the stories, values and traditions at the centre of Jewish life, and Grinspoon wanted to find a way back in. He had watched his own grandchildren light up when they received Jewish children’s books. 

He called his daughter-in-law, Harold Grinspoon Foundation president Winnie Sandler Grinspoon, with the idea – a Jewish version of Imagination Library. They would source beautiful storybooks each month, send them directly to children’s homes and find local partners to help fund and distribute them.

And just like that, PJ Library was born. The “PJ” stands for pyjamas, a nod to bedtime reading.

By the time of Parton’s death, her Imagination Library had gifted more than 200 million books to children worldwide. PJ Library had distributed more than 50 million of its own.

In a 2023 interview with PJ Library’s PROOF magazine, Parton talked about what the connection meant to her.

“I’m always honoured when my Imagination Library inspires others, like Harold Grinspoon and PJ Library. That is so very special to me, especially because the Imagination Library comes from a very personal place for me,” she said.

“My daddy didn’t get a chance to learn to read or write, and that was so hard for him. He was one of the wisest men I have ever known, but his inability to read kept him from fulfilling all his dreams.”

Her father lived long enough to see the program take off. 

“Before he passed away, my dad told me that he was more proud of me for the Imagination Library than anything I had ever done. I can’t tell you how much that means to me to this day.”

Sandler Grinspoon met Parton personally to thank her, and wrote in the same issue of PROOF that “she couldn’t have been more gracious. We were there to thank her, and yet she was thanking us in return. It was a moment to celebrate our shared mission to fill homes with books and the power of stories”.

Parton’s Jewish connections went further than many people knew. Coat of Many Colors drew on the story of Joseph, while The Master’s Hand, written in 1971, told the stories of Noah and the three Hebrew figures Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego from the Book of Daniel. “

I know my Bible stories,” she wrote in Songteller.

And two Brooklyn-born Jewish men helped shape her career. Talent agent Sandy Gallin was the one who pushed Parton from Nashville into mainstream pop stardom in the late 1970s, convincing her to record Here You Come Again, produced by Gary Klein. It became her first album to sell millions of copies.

But the relationship was about much more than hits. Parton and Gallin co-founded a production company, Sandollar, and at one point shared an apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. After Gallin’s death in 2017, Parton said, “Nobody could quite get how the Christian Southern girl and the New York Jewish boy could have so much in common. But it was real”.

In Songteller, she wrote of Gallin, “We were from two completely different worlds, but we just clicked, somehow. He was just one of those friends that you find who you just know are going to be your friend forever”.

PJ Library launched in Australia in 2011 and now operates in partnership with organisations including UJEB in Victoria and Shalom Collective in NSW.

Grinspoon, now 97, reflected on Parton’s example in a recent Jerusalem Post interview. “I was inspired by Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, a national literacy program I supported in my area,” he said.

Parton had been open about various health issues in recent years, particularly after the death of her husband Carl Dean in March 2025 at the age of 82, following 58 years of marriage.

Asked in her PROOF interview what mattered most about continuing the literacy work, Parton kept it simple.

“It’s worth it all because we are reaching so many children and families,” she said. “They truly are our future.”