SEVIERVILLE, Aug 28 — To nine-year-old Zenaida, it wasn’t Dolly Parton’s storied country music career that made her so great.

It’s the entertainment icon’s beloved Imagination Library book donation programme that has had the biggest impact on the young girl’s life.

“These are the first books I learned how to read,” Zenaida told AFP late Wednesday, flipping through Parton’s “Coat of Many Colors” children’s book at a makeshift memorial in the singer-songwriter’s hometown at the foot of the Great Smoky Mountains.

Parton’s extraordinarily successful book project was born of personal anguish: her own father grew up illiterate in rural Tennessee.

But thanks to the Imagination Library, millions of children like Zenaida in the US and around the world have received a literacy boost from Parton herself: books that arrive by mail, for free, from birth until age five.

For Kendal Manning’s two young boys, the programme has been a godsend.

“We’ve been receiving their books since they were born. We have them all,” the 41-year-old theatre performer told AFP at the memorial, where several Imagination Library books were left among the flowers.

When Manning’s boys where born, “immediately we were sent something in the mail to sign up,” she said.

“It says mountains about the person that she is, the heart that she had for people,” Manning said.

Parton, who died this week at 80, is globally renowned for her music. But locals remembered her more for her charitable giving and care for younger generations in blue-collar regions of her native east Tennessee.

Her non-profit foundation is committed to keeping the popular programme going.

What began in 1995 as Parton’s modest giveaway of 6,000 books to needy children has mushroomed into an operation involving hundreds of local groups and multiple publishers.

“Now we give away 3.4 million books a month to kids” up to age five, Dollywood Foundation’s treasurer Eugene Naughton told AFP.

The foundation funds the programme, along with several other donors.

The book lady

Literacy was a critical focus for Parton, who has said she set up the Imagination Library because of her own father’s inability to read, which “probably kept him from seeing all his dreams come true.”

“I’m the Book Lady to lots of kids, and I take great pride in that,” she once said in an interview with NBC’s Boston affiliate.

The books have reached countless families in east Tennessee, where hospitals often invite new parents into the programme.

“I signed up all five of my grandchildren on the day they were born,” Susan Williams recalled in Sevierville.

“My children had the books too, and now their children have them. Two generations,” she said, holding back tears.

Imagination Library claims 300 million books gifted since its inception. The programme has extended to Australia, Britain, Canada and Ireland.

In the US, Parton’s books have reached as far as Bethel, Alaska, a small town accessible only by plane or boat that serves as a hub for Indigenous villages.

Zenaida’s mother Katy Allis had brought her four children to the Parton memorial to honour the woman who changed their lives.

Her son Victor, 11, plopped onto the sidewalk to read his Imagination Library edition of “Llama Llama Red Pajama,” a family favourite.

“I see her programme as a part of our collective culture,” said Allis.

“I don’t know there are even words to express how important that is.”

Local teacher Tabitha Thomas, 34, was also at the memorial with her three children who are growing up with the books, including her seven-month-old who has already received a few in the mail.

Impoverished kids in the region “often don’t have the money to buy those books, so it helps a lot of the community,” she said of Parton’s generosity.

“She’s touched so many lives.” — AFP