Dolly Parton is sending free books to children across 21 states — and around the world

Dolly Parton’s father grew up in poverty and never had the chance to learn to read.

Inspired by her upbringing, the 78-year-old country music legend has made it its mission to improve literacy through its Imagination Library book giveaway program for the past three decades. It recently expanded to places like Missouri and Kentucky, two of the 21 states where all children under 5 can sign up to have books shipped to their homes each month.

To celebrate, she visited both states on Tuesday to promote the program and tell the story of her father, Robert Lee Parton, who died in 2000.

“In the mountains, a lot of people never got a chance to go to school because they had to work on the farms,” she said at the Folly Theater in Kansas City, Missouri. “They had to do whatever it took to keep the rest of the family going.”

Parton, the fourth of 12 children from a poor family in Appalachia, said her father was “one of the smartest people I’ve ever known” but was ashamed that he couldn’t read.

So she decided to help other children, rolling out the program initially in one county in her home state of Tennessee in 1995. It quickly spread from there, and today more than 3 million books are sent each month. Since the program began, books have been sent to more than 240 million children in the U.S., Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland and Australia.

Missouri covers the entire cost of the program, which was $11 million in the last fiscal year. Most other states contribute money through a cost-sharing model.

“The kids started calling me the ‘book lady,'” Parton said. “And Dad was more proud of that than of me being a star. But Dad got the sense that he had done something really great, too.”

Parton, who won the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award a decade ago, said she eventually wants to see the program in every state. She said she’s proud her father lived long enough to see the program get off the ground.

“That was kind of a way of honoring my dad, because the Bible says to honor your father and mother,” she said. “And I don’t think that just means ‘just obey.’ I think it means honor their name and them.”

Parton is an author herself, having written the 1996 children’s book “Coat of Many Colors,” which is part of the book giveaway program.

As she prepared to sing her famous song of the same name, she explained that it was about a coat her mother had made for her from a patchwork of mismatched fabrics, because the family was too poor to afford a large piece of one fabric. Parton was proud of it because her mother compared it to the multi-colored coat spoken of in the Bible — a fantastic gift from Jacob to his son Joseph.

Classmates, however, laughed at her. For years, she said the experience was a “deep, deep pain.”

She said that when she wrote and performed the song, “the pain left me.” She has received letters over the years from people who said it did the same to them.

“The fact,” she explained, “that that song has meant so much not only to me, but to so many other people for so many different reasons, makes it my favorite song.”

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Hollingsworth reported from Mission, Kansas.