Aunt Dolly forever: How Dolly Parton raised the Hannah Montana generation on rockstar aunts and rhinestones

"Being a teenage girl is harder than walking through a balloon shop with a porcupine purse."

Aunt Dolly always had it right.

For a huge swath of millennials, the first Dolly Parton wasn't the songwriter behind Jolene or the woman who famously turned down Elvis Presley's request to record I Will Always Love You. She was Aunt Dolly, the ever-beaming godmother in the fictional Malibu beach house on Disney Channel, long before anyone in the audience understood what a Grammy was.

She showed up in Good Golly, Miss Dolly, Hannah Montana's Season 1 episode, not really as a guest star, but as family, Miley Stewart's (Miley Cyrus) honorary aunt and godmother, dropping into the plot with the kind of Southern-fried charisma that eight- and nine-year-olds had never encountered on basic cable before.

It was almost as if she had wandered onto the Disney lot straight off a porch in the Smoky Mountains, dragging decades of one-liners and a whole philosophy of life behind her. She would return twice more over the show's run, in Season 2's I Will Always Loathe You and Season 4's "Kiss It All Goodbye, the former being a 'granny smackdown' as she and Mamaw Ruthie fight backstage over Elvis Pressley.

Aunt Dolly brought the country tinge to Hannah Montana, even for those who didn't even know what country was. Sharp-tongued advice dressed up as folksy wisdom, the aunt that most of us wanted at that age. The aunt who could perform a middle-school heist with you and well, give you advice on boys.

You didn't have to know a single Dolly Parton song to know that this woman, whoever she was, was somebody's favourite aunt.

And now, in the hours after her death, that's exactly what's flooding timelines, among clips of her at the Grammys and archival footage from the Opry stage. There's a particular kind of grief in losing someone who was never quite yours to claim, but who somehow still felt like yours. The Hannah Montana gifs and clips share a legacy of their own: The exaggerated drawl stretched out for comic effect. The little moments that felt, to a twelve-year-old watching after school, like getting a glimpse of what a genuinely cool aunt might sound like.

It's a strange, sweet kind of inheritance. Most of those same millennials would go on to actually meet Dolly Parton's music years later, discovering a classic hit on a road trip playlist, or hearing one of her songs covered by another artist and falling down a rabbit hole to find the original. Some wouldn't grasp the full scope of who she was, the songwriting genius, the shrewd businesswoman, the philanthropist behind an entire childhood literacy movement, until well into adulthood, looking back with the kind of retroactive awe reserved for people who turn out to be far bigger than you ever realised as a child.

Most legends settle into a single legacy. Very few artists get to occupy two completely different corners of pop culture memory at once ,the reverent one, built on decades of chart-topping records and industry milestones, and the goofy, purely joyful one, built on a handful of sitcom cameos that had nothing to do with any of that

Dolly Parton somehow managed to become a fixture of the Country Music Hall of Fame and a beloved recurring bit on a tween sitcom, without either version diminishing the other.

If anything, they fed each other, the sitcom cameo made the legend approachable, and the legend made the cameo feel like a genuine gift rather than a stunt. That might just be product of an artist who never seemed to draw a line between reaching the top of an industry and just showing up, fully herself, wherever she was invited.

She could be a country legend to the world and Aunt Dolly to a generation — and somehow, both were simply Dolly.