Dolly Parton donates $1M to Helene relief effort: ‘These are my people’

Country music legend Dolly Parton has her neighbors’ back in the wake of Hurricane Helene – announcing a huge donation towards the relief efforts.

The “Islands in the Stream” singer announced Friday that she has donated a whopping $1 million to help those impacted by Helene – as folks across the region struggle to recover from the storm that has killed over 200 people.

Parton held a press conference at the Walmart in Newport, Tennessee, in the shadow of the area where the singer was born and raised.

Despite the somber circumstances, residents of the Volunteer State were thrilled to see “Aunt Granny” and the legendary singer was not able to leave a crowd disappointed. Her performer’s instincts took over and she delighted the folks who came out to see her to storm-centric version of one of her classic hits.

“Helene, Helene, Helene, Helene/You came in here and broke us all apart/Helene, Helene, Helene, Helene/But we’re all here to mend these broken hearts,” Parton sang to the tune of her 1973 song “Jolene”.

“I really wish that we were all together for another reason,” Dolly went on, without singing, “Who knew, in our little part of the country here, where I was born and raised just right down the road that we would have this kind of devastation. And I look around and think these are my mountains, these are my valleys, these are my rivers, flowing like a stream. These are my people,” adding in conclusion, “This is my home.”

Parton said that this is a time for everyone to “step up” – and she was setting the example by donating $1 million from her own bank account. But she wasn’t stopping there.

The country mogul said that through her Dollywood Foundation and a few other organizations she organized the donation of another $1 million to The Mountain Ways Foundation.

At the same press conference Walmart CEO John Furner announced that Walmart, Sam’s Club and the Walmart Foundation were increasing their donation to $10 million, up from the previously announced $6 million.

One week since the storm, over one hundred people are still unaccounted for and feared dead. The death toll as of Friday climbed to over 200 people, making Helene the deadliest storm in the US since Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Experts say that Helene and other storms in the past week have dumped more than 40 trillion gallons of water into the region.

“That’s an astronomical amount of precipitation,” Ed Clark, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Water Center told PBS, “I have not seen something in my 25 years of working at the weather service that is this geographically large of an extent and the sheer volume of water that fell from the sky.”

Victims of the storm continue to struggle to gain access to food, water, electricity, and cell phone service.

Earlier today, Elon Musk expressed his frustration with FEMA, as his company SpaceX attempts to deliver relief materials including “Starlinks”, which are iPad-sized localized satellite connections. This public call-out comes in the wake of many reports that FEMA has been wanting in their storm-response.