Bert Swartz spent 40 to 45 hours painting a guitar inspired by Dolly Parton’s 1971 song “Coat of Many Colors.” Getting the country star to sign it took a different kind of persistence.
For the retired Pasco County Libraries employee, the goal was to help The Angelus, a Hudson nonprofit that provides lifelong housing, individualized care and enrichment programs for adults with developmental disabilities who cannot walk.
The guitar eventually reached Julien’s Auctions in November 2024, with proceeds benefiting The Angelus. Swartz said the buyer paid a total of $2,500.
Long before the sale, she studied the song’s lyrics and imagined how to bring them to life with acrylic paint and an airbrushed background.
“For one thing, (“Coat of Many Colors”) just paints a big picture,” Swartz said. “It was so dear to her. I just wanted to do something that she would’ve loved.”
She started with Parton’s face, the detail she considers essential to any portrait guitar.
“The face is … that’s the money shot,” she said. “I start with the face because if I mess that up, I can’t go on to the rest.”
With the artwork finished, Swartz began trying to reach Parton.
“It took many dead-end letters and many dead-end calls.”
Then she heard Jeff Conyers, president of Parton’s Imagination Library, on NPR. She grabbed a pencil, wrote down his name and sent him a letter about her project.
She included a photograph of herself with characters she had made for a children’s library. During her years with Pasco County Libraries, Swartz created figures from insulation foam when she wasn’t working at the desk. Her artwork also includes two hand-painted tables at Regency Park Library.
Swartz suspects that the photograph she sent helped her request find its way to Parton.
“I think that may have been the glue,” she said.
Conyers connected her with his assistant, Kathy Brown, who coordinated the signing. Swartz nervously shipped the guitar, then traveled with her husband to pick it up at Parton’s Imagination Library in Tennessee.
Inside the case, they had packed letters, cards, and coloring-book pages that The Angelus residents had made for Parton.
When the couple arrived at Imagination Library headquarters, Brown told them Parton had gone through every one, Swartz said.
Swartz’s involvement with The Angelus began around 2006, through work on T-shirts for a Charlie Daniels fundraising event. Asked to decorate guitars for an auction, she tested a colored pencil on a paint stir stick before taking on the unfamiliar surface.
She has since completed about a dozen guitars, including a Taylor Swift guitar. “It was a pick guard that she had signed. So, I’m just wondering how much that baby’s worth.”
Following Parton’s death, Swartz recalled her disbelief at the news.
“I think everybody thought that she’d live forever,” she said. “But she’s going to live forever in our hearts, especially The Angelus.”
For Swartz, the reason behind the work remains the same.
“It’s not about me. It’s about The Angelus,” she said. “It’s such a wonderful place. And the people that work there are so wonderful. And this is why I do it.”