They Picked the 25th Because of “9 to 5.” Everything the Register Takes Goes to Books.
There is a certain kind of Nashville tribute that involves a candlelight vigil and a lot of people saying lovely things. And then there is the kind where somebody opens a honky-tonk on Lower Broadway, works a full day, and hands over the entire till.
Friends in Low Places Bar & Honky-Tonk, at 411 Broadway, has declared Friday, Sept. 25 to be “Dolly Day.” Every cent the building takes in over the course of that day — food, drinks, merchandise, all of it — goes to Dolly Parton's Imagination Library. Not a percentage. Not the proceeds from a special cocktail. Whatever the register says when the lights come up.
The date is the joke, and the joke is the point
They did not pick Sept. 25 at random. Nine to five. It is the sort of wink Parton herself would have appreciated, and probably would have made first.
Parton died in Nashville on Aug. 25 at the age of 80, and the two weeks that followed produced the kind of civic grief this city does not often show in public. Broadway is a street built on volume and neon and the business of a good time; it is not a place that goes quiet. It went quiet for a while.
Trisha Yearwood, whose name is on the building alongside Garth Brooks', has framed the day simply: whatever the cash register says at the end of the night is going to the thing Parton cared most about, and the day is about her love of children's literacy rather than about the bar. Brooks, for his part, offered a line that has been making the rounds since — that Parton is proof that a life spent loving is a life that goes on afterward.
What the money actually does
The Imagination Library is the part of Parton's legacy that has nothing to do with a stage. She started it in 1995 in Sevier County, the East Tennessee community she came from, for a plain reason: her father never learned to read, and she had watched what that cost a proud man. The program mails a free, age-appropriate book every month to any enrolled child from birth until they turn five. No income test. No application essay. The book simply arrives with the child's name on it.
What began as a county-level idea has since mailed more than 300 million books to children across multiple countries. For a lot of American families, a Parton-funded hardcover was the first book that belonged to a kid outright rather than being borrowed from a shelf.
Brooks and Yearwood have said they intend to make Dolly Day an annual fixture, which turns a one-off tribute into something with a chance of compounding — the kind of arrangement Parton, a shrewd businesswoman long before she was a beloved one, would have recognized immediately.
If you are going
Lower Broadway on a Friday in late September is Lower Broadway on a Friday: crowded, loud, worth it. Come early if you want a seat, and know that on this particular day the round you buy is doing double duty.
There is a second Parton tribute on the calendar before then, too — a night of Nashville singers performing her catalog on Sept. 16.
🎟 Get tickets to the Sept. 16 Dolly Parton tribute concert »
Coming in from out of town for either one? Book your stay »
