Commentary: Dolly Parton stood up for undocumented immigrants when few others would

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Set us as preferred My favorite Dolly Parton song is nowhere near her most famous and not even among her best.But if you want to honor the late country music legend’s legacy — a testament to the Gospel’s radical notions of love, acceptance and uplifting the marginalized — you need to blast her cover of Woody Guthrie’s “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos).”Guthrie wrote the weeper in 1948 to commemorate a plane crash in California’s Central Valley that killed all 32 passengers, including 28 Mexican nationals with a one-way ticket back home.

The leftist balladeer was furious that media accounts named the four white victims but none of the Mexicans, reducing them to their status as mere deportees.Musical giants like the Byrds, Joan Baez, Johnny Cash and Pete Seeger had covered “Deportee,” but no one with Parton’s mainstream fame.She released her version in 1980 as part of a concept album hailing blue-collar workers that was a companion to her hit film “9 to 5.” Entertainment & Arts Dolly Parton’s death has left the music, film and television worlds reeling, with stars and luminaries across those industries and more paying tribute to the beloved entertainer’s life and legacy.Parton could have limited her tracks to farmers, coal miners, swing shifters, assembly line workers and other laborers whom country music constantly lionizes, and no one would have complained.

It would have been the safe option, anyway.The Reagan revolution was remaking American politics.

American sentiment was turning against newcomers, whether Vietnamese refugees, Cuban and Haitian boat people, Central Americans fleeing civil wars or Mexicans looking for economic opportunity.But Parton felt that immigrants — legal and not — were part of America’s story, too.She sings “Deportee” like the dirge it is — and then ...