“She never saw a door she couldn’t open. The doors she opened, made and changed history,” said Dolly Parton’s nephew Bryan Seaver in a video statement announcing the iconic singer’s passing at age 80 on August 25.

Raised in humble beginnings in a one-room cabin in Tennessee, Dolly Parton rose to the greatest heights of American music, selling more than 100 million records across her storied career. A prolific songwriter who penned more than 3,000 original songs, she once noted that she may have written “Jolene” and “I Will Always Love You” on the same night.

She was a beloved mother figure to many, and was more interested in action than talk. She created the Imagination Library to “help children dream bigger, learn more, and believe in themselves through the gift of literacy.” The program has gifted, for free, more than 300 million books to children around the world.

Called a “uniter of people” by The New York Times, Dolly showed us how we can respect, relate, and cooperate across differences. In 1997, she was asked how she was able to maintain fan bases within both the religious right and the LGBTQ communities. She replied, “It’s two different worlds, and I live in both and I love them both, and I understand and accept both.”

It’s two different worlds, and I live in both and I love them both, and I understand and accept both.

Throughout her five-decade career, Dolly bridged divides and steered us toward a stronger, more inclusive society. And she taught us the values of resilience and growth in any environment.

As she wrote in her Grammy-award winning album with Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstadt, “Just a wild mountain rose needing freedom to grow, So I ran fearing up where I’d go, When a flower grows wild it can always survive, Wildflowers don’t care where they grow.”