Dolly Walks These Streets Now
Krewe of Dolly in the 2024 Pride Parade, photo by Melanie Cole
August 2026Dolly Parton may have passed, but 700 New Orleans women in the Krewe of Dolly will carry on her legacy by wearing big wigs, glittering rhinestones – and giving books to thousands of children.
– by Karla Marie “Karlita” Cochran
On Tuesday, the woman who taught a generation of us how to be underestimated and win anyway laid her rhinestones down for good. Dolly Parton died in Nashville at 80, after what her family called a brief battle with cancer.
The tributes will run long, and they should. She sold a hundred million records, she built a theme park in the mountains she came from, she wrote "I Will Always Love You" and "Jolene" and "9 to 5," and she did it all while letting the whole world think she was just a pretty girl with big hair and a big laugh.
She was one of the sharpest business minds of the last century, and most people missed it because she made it look like fun.
But the line in her family's statement that stopped me was the smallest one. They asked that donations go to her Imagination Library, the program that mails free books, month after month, to children who might otherwise have none.
This column is underwritten in part by Michelle Broom
That was Dolly's whole genius, right there in a single instruction issued from inside her own grief. She spent a lifetime building a thing that could keep giving after she was gone. And that is where this becomes a New Orleans story.
Because here, when Dolly asked, we did not just send a check. We put on the wig.
I am one of more than 700 women in this city who belong to the Krewe of Dolly. The first parade I ever marched was Bosom Buddies – right here in the French Quarter – and I did not expect what it would do to me. You put on the wig and the lashes and the rhinestone dress, and something shifts.
Several members of Krewe of Dolly gather in the lobby of the Omni Royal Orleans before the French Quarter Easter Parade, 2026. Photo by Ellis Anderson
Writer and member of the Krewe of Dolly, Karlita Cochran, with her husband, Charles J. Cochran, photo courtesy Karlita Cochran
You stop being only yourself. You turn a corner in the oldest neighborhood in the city, and the roar comes up the street to meet you, and you understand you are part of something much bigger than the reflection you saw in the mirror that morning.
That parade is where the whole thing was born, too. A speech pathologist named Sarah Post and a group of her friends, most of them educators, started dressing as Dolly for Bosom Buddies and going to lunch in the Quarter afterward. It started just for fun.
Then, the way the best New Orleans things do, it took itself seriously. In 2022, they made it a nonprofit built around literacy, and they built it on one question they still ask before every decision: What would Dolly do?
I love that my first steps in her wig fell on the same streets where it all started. The Quarter holds a thing like that for you.
That first time turned into a way of life. Since then, I have shaken my way through Bosom Buddies again, through the Krewe of Cork with its wine and its wandering crowds, through Pride, the Holiday parade, and the New Year’s Day parade with the whole city out and glittering.
Krewe of Dolly in the French Quarter Easter Parade 2026, photo by Ellis Anderson
Different parade, different season, same wig. The same joy every single time.
If you have never seen us coming, picture it. Hundreds of Dollies. The wigs, the rhinestones, the shakes on the route, a whole block lighting up at once. It is ridiculous and it is holy – both at once – which is the most New Orleans thing I can say about anything.
But far beyond the shakes on the parade route, here is what we are actually doing. We are raising money and registering children for Dolly Parton's Imagination Library right here at home, working for the 6,000 children in Orleans Parish enrolled by December of this year.
Every one of those children gets a book in the mail with their name on it. A book that is theirs. In a city that has fought for its children's right to read for as long as I have been alive, that is not a costume. That is the work.
Krewe of Dolly in action at the French Market District’s annual Boo Carré Festival, 2025. The 2026 event takes place October 24. Photo by Ellis Anderson for French Quarter Journal
Krewe of Dolly in action at the French Market District’s annual Boo Carré Festival, 2025. The 2026 event takes place October 24. Photo by Ellis Anderson for French Quarter Journal
People underestimated Dolly her entire life, and she let them on purpose – and then, she out-worked and out-earned the room. She owned what she built and never signed away the thing she made. She was generous without being soft.
Don't get me wrong, she liked to say, I am not a pushover just because I'm nice. I have carried that sentence into more than one business negotiation, and I have never once regretted it.
That is the lesson the wig is hiding. Authenticity was her strategy. She knew exactly who she was, and she built with purpose, and she made room in what she built for the rest of us to climb in and carry it forward.
A woman from the Tennessee mountains reached all the way down to a parish in south Louisiana and handed us something to do with our joy. We took it and ran.
Krewe of Dolly 2025 French Quarter Easter Parade, photo by Ellis Anderson for French Quarter Journal
So, now the world will mourn a country legend, and it will build her a monument out of her songs, and it will be right to. But New Orleans already built her monument.
It is not marble. It walks. It wears a blonde wig and a rhinestone dress and it is coming down the street toward you, laughing. And when it reaches out to the community, it is going to hand the children a book.
That is how you know a leader was real. Long after she is gone, her work will continue to put books into children's hands.
Rest easy, Dolly… our queen. We've got the streets from here.
Watch the Krewe of Dolly march in the 2026 Pride Parade, video by Ellis Anderson