I have carried that sentence for over three decades. Through a ruptured brain aneurysm and a coma. Through work and life and kids and major love and major angst. Through a country that has sometimes made me feel like a guest in my own home. Through every stretch when the deluge of rain seemed like the entire forecast.

It is seventeen words from a woman who grew up in a one-room cabin in the Smoky Mountains, and they has done more for me than most anything I have ever learned. Dolly Parton died Tuesday, and I want to tell you how a man from Damascus came to depend on a line like that.

It starts in 1989, in her theme park, with a camera in my hands and very little idea about country music.

I was on assignment for The Knoxville Journal. I had been in this country five years. I had come from Damascus, where the music I loved was Fairuz and Abdel Halim Hafez where a song could hold a whole city's grief in one long vowel. Country music, to my ear then, was noise with a twang in it. I could not hear the story for the accent. I went to Dollywood because it was that day’s photo assignment.

And it was a lovely day. Dolly was surrounded by photographers and I was one of them. She said y'all. She said ain't. She said all the words I was still learning, and she owned every word. I had spent five years being corrected — my grammar, my vowels, my faith. And here was a woman who talked exactly the way she came.

I do not have the photograph anymore. What I do have is what came after.

I started listening. Not out of admiration, but out of the ordinary curiosity of a working journalist who had just spent a day around someone and wanted to know what the fuss was about. And somewhere in that listening, the accent stopped being in the way and became the point.

She was the fourth of twelve children in a cabin with a dirt floor. She was mocked for what she wore and underestimated for how she talked, and she never sanded any of it off. She kept the hair. She kept the voice. She let people think she was simple for sixty years while she built an empire, and she was too busy to correct them.

Anyone who has arrived in a new country knows the pressure to file yourself down. Soften the name. Flatten the vowels. Become legible. Dolly's entire life was an argument against that. Find out who you are, she said, and do it on purpose. She might as well have been talking directly to a Syrian kid in Tennessee who was still deciding how much of himself to keep.

If you don't like the road you're walking, start paving another one. I had done that already, across an ocean, though it had not occurred to me to be proud of it until she said it that way.

She is gone now. I never got to tell her that a girl from a cabin in the Smokies taught a man from Damascus how to stay himself. But I have put up with a great deal of rain, and she was right about what comes after.