Dolly Parton with newborn Emma, the first baby in Rotherham to receive a book from the Imagination Library programme. Photograph: The Rotherham NHS Foundation Trust View image in fullscreen Dolly Parton with newborn Emma, the first baby in Rotherham to receive a book from the Imagination Library programme. Photograph: The Rotherham NHS Foundation Trust Dolly Parton ‘In walked this big bundle of energy’: the day Dolly Parton came to Rotherham Country star came to South Yorkshire town in 2007 for UK launch of the Imagination Library, her book donation scheme
Esther Addley Sat 29 Aug 2026 09.00 CEST Last modified on Sat 29 Aug 2026 15.25 CEST Share Prefer the Guardian on Google S hane Jarman was up a ladder decorating a Christmas tree at the school where he was deputy headteacher when he got a call asking him to come to Rotherham hospital ASAP. It was December 2007 and Jarman’s wife, Claire, had given birth the previous day to their first child, a girl called Emma, so of course he rushed to the phone. All was well, he was told, but that “everything would become clear” when he got to the hospital.
Once there, his wife told him – somewhat unexpectedly – that they were going to meet Dolly Parton. “And literally within what felt like five minutes,” he recalled, “there were great camera flashes , lots of noise, lots of clicking and in walked this real big bundle of energy.”
View image in fullscreen Shane Jarman and his wife, Claire, watch as Dolly Parton holds newborn Emma. Photograph: The Rotherham NHS Foundation Trust Jarman said that as his wife handed over their tiny 4lb 6oz baby to the country star, “all I remember is seeing Dolly Parton with my little girl’s head in her hand and these great big red nails”.
Read more Was he a little nervous about the nails? “I was very nervous about the nails to be quite honest.”
Parton was in the South Yorkshire former mining and steelworking town – not principally known for its razzle-dazzle – for the British launch of the Imagination Library, the book donation programme the musician had started in her Tennessee home of Sevier County a little over a decade earlier, and which she had been invited to extend to children in Yorkshire.
View image in fullscreen Dolly Parton performs at the launch of her children’s literacy scheme in Rotherham. Photograph: Rui Vieira/PA If Rotherham – or at least a gathering of local dignitaries that assembled later in a disused steelworks – was a little bemused by the singer, Parton knew places like this, and of course knew how to charm.
“I gotta make sure I say your town name right – it’s Rother’m?” she said, flattening the famous southern twang to something approximating flat Yorkshire vowels. “Did I get it right? I’ve been practising because it don’t look like that on paper. In the States, anything that’s h-a-m we have to say Rother- ham .”
Among the torrent of tributes to the entertainer, businesswoman and philanthropist since her death on Monday, Rotherham too has been remembering the impact of a woman who, for all her own glamour, cared deeply about places that had a little less of it.
Parton may have jested when she said she had considered buying a South Yorkshire pied-à-terre (“so you may be walking down the streets of Rotherham and see me coming out of a little cubbyhole somewhere”), but her description of the post-industrialist town as “a heart spot for me” was sincere, thanks to the similarities she saw to her own outsider upbringing.
“I totally related to…