She is “Singer, songwriter and… savior”, risks it New York Times. “Dolly Parton will save America again”, writes Vanity Fair. Almost a year after the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, the queen of country music seems to have done more to fight the coronavirus than Donald Trump or Joe Biden. And for good reason: the singer, who is at the head of a multi-million dollar empire, has paid a million dollars of her personal fortune to help research on the vaccine against Covid-19.
Ryan Cordell, an associate professor of English at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, is one of the first to pay tribute to him, in music, as it should be. On November 17, he posted a video on Twitter in which he performed an edited version of Jolene. For the occasion, the iconic song by Dolly Parton is renamed Vaccinated and the academic was based on lyrics written by linguist and author Gretchen McCulloch, who uploaded them and invited internet users to record them. In this new version, the lyrics have become:
“Vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, vaccine /
I’m begging of you, please go in my arm /
Vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, vaccine /
Please just keep me safe from Covid harm. “
@GretchenAMcC I couldn’t resist trying it immediately, though I had to sing a bit more quietly than I typically wou… https://t.co/v4aYkEpOUT
In April, the Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee, revealed that it had received a donation of $ 1 million (approximately € 844,000) for research on the coronavirus. from Dolly Parton, “In honor of his lifelong friend: Doctor Naji Abumrad”.
Their meeting took place seven years earlier, on October 21, 2013. At the end of the morning, the singer had been the victim of a car accident. Benin, certainly, sufficient for it to be sent to the VUMC, for some examinations. It was there that she met Doctor Naji Abumrad. This Lebanese-American doctor, professor of surgery at Vanderbilt University knew little or nothing about the country music star, but, during their discussions, they became friends.
A drop of water in the funding committed
In the early days of the pandemic, Dolly Parton asked Naji Abumrad what could be done to study the virus. “Honestly, I never had to ask for his research support, says Naji Abumrad in the Washington post. It was she who suggested it. His funding has made research for the vaccine go ten times faster than it would without him. “
Naji Abumrad told him about “Exciting developments” carried out as part of the first research on vaccines by a team at Vanderbilt led by Mark Denison, physician and professor of pathology, microbiology and immunology. For his part, Mark Denison tells the New York Times that Dolly Parton’s donation was instrumental in funding the early stages “Reviews” research and testing.
Part of the funds were used to finance trials of the vaccine developed by the company Moderna – a drop in the bucket when you remember that the company received nearly a billion dollars in public money – which thanks the “Dolly Parton Covid-19 Research Fund” in the publication of its results in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Yet Dolly Parton is not the only one to have put her hand in the wallet to support research against the coronavirus. The Clara Lionel Foundation, by Rihanna, and Jay-Z’s Shawn Carter Foundation have each donated to several organizations fighting the pandemic.
When I donated the money to the Covid fund I just wanted it to do good and evidently, it is! Let’s just hope we can… https://t.co/Mn4KoAUEuw
And there is an emergency: Thursday, November 19, the United States reached the mark of 250,000 deaths attributed to Covid-19 for more than 11.5 million cases identified since the start of the pandemic, according to the baseline count of Johns Hopkins University. This is more than double the number of American soldiers killed in the First World War.
Dolly Parton, rallying point of a disoriented America
This is not the first time that the singer ” Safe “ America. In a country more divided than ever, she celebrated, in 2019, “Love, family, faith and forgiveness” in a series called Sensitive strings (Heartstrings), streamed on Netflix. Through a series of podcasts, American public radios have also explored “The America of Dolly Parton”, that of an enigmatic woman who cultivates wonderfully ” at the same time “, beloved by everyone, rallying point for conservatives and liberals, “clam frogs” and the LGBT community. The series was produced and hosted by … Jad Abumrad, the son of Professor Naji Abumrad.
At 74, the great lady of country does not intend to stop there: after the release, in early October, of A Holly Dolly Christmas, a CD of Christmas carols, she returns to Netflix on November 22 with a movie titled Dolly Parton: it’s Christmas with us (Dolly Parton’s Christmas). Still, for the author of these lines, the best cover of Jolene remains that of White Stripes. Even Dolly Parton agreed, in 2016, in an interview with Guardian.
