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Dolly Parton

Letters to the editor

Jim Newton Itasca, Ill. Dolly Parton will be missed for many reasons, but don’t forget her guitar playing skills. A 1979 YouTube clip shows her effortlessly playing an acoustic guitar wearing acrylic nails on her right (picking) hand. I’ve been playing guitar for decades and can’t do it with natural nails. Dolly and Glen Campbell were such complete performers that people overlooked their guitar playing. It’s heartening to see so many non-country music artists like John Mayer paying tribute to Parton. She bridged a lot of gaps. Is that gift still transferrable to ...

Those with sleep apnea might need to urinate more than others

Columns

DEAR DR. ROACH: I’m writing regarding the recent column that mentioned frequent nighttime urination. I had a similar problem and awakened several times to urinate each night. About a year ago, I started using a CPAP for sleep apnea. Immediately after starting to use the CPAP, my nighttime urination frequency decreased. It’d range from sleeping completely through the night to waking up twice, with an average of waking up once per night. Building off a prior column, my hypothesis was that better sleep led to a more stable production of the natural diuretic that the body makes at ...

Dolly Parton was rich in all the right ways

Columns

One of the unfortunate realities of getting older is finding that the people you like begin to die. There are some, maybe, who are taken before their time and others who go at the end of a complete life, but either way the obituaries pile up. When Dolly Parton died the other day, I felt the weight of another passing. I never met her, but she represented more to me (and to many others, I imagine) than her songwriting, her acting and her singing. I saw in her the way poverty can shape a person — slash their outsides and scar them in ways that never fully heal — while still failing to ...

Dear Annie: Can’t get a word in with long-winded friend

Columns

Dear Annie: I have a friend I’ve known for more than 30 years. He is a good person, loyal and generous, and we share a lot of history. The problem is that he has absolutely no sense of when he has lost a room. At dinner parties, he can take over the entire conversation with a story that lasts 15 or 20 minutes. And these are not short, lively stories. We get every street name, every person’s first and last name, what someone ordered for lunch, what year it happened and usually several side stories before he finally gets to the point. By then, everyone else has stopped trying to ...

Thank you, Dolly Parton, for your music, good humor and public service

Columns

Since imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, I am told, I was not surprised to hear Dolly Parton say in an interview that she once entered a “Dolly Parton lookalike” drag queen contest in Los Angeles unannounced — and lost. Parton, who died Tuesday at age 80, enjoyed telling that story, which illustrated, among other things, that it wasn’t always easy to be Dolly, even for Dolly. “Nobody applauded,” she said in a May 2025 radio interview, “like a little trickle that was probably David, my hairdresser.” Go figure. Maybe she looked too much like the real thing ...

Twilight’s last gleaming

Columns

There is a point in the decline of republics when the problem is no longer that government breaks its own laws. Governments will always behave unlawfully. The deeper problem comes when the constitutional machinery designed to prevent those acts stops functioning — when spending becomes detached from arithmetic, presidential power becomes detached from law and Congress and the courts become detached from the Constitution. That’s where America is today. The fiscal warning could hardly be clearer. The government’s debt has now passed $40 trillion. The Congressional Budget Office ...