Obituary · Music
Dolly Parton, Queen of Country Music, Dies at 80
In six decades she wrote more than 3,000 songs, built a theme park and a global children’s literacy charity, and turned a log-cabin childhood into one of the most beloved careers in American music.
Dolly Parton, the singer, songwriter, actress and philanthropist who became one of the most recognisable figures in American culture, died on 25 August in Nashville. She was 80. Her family announced the death in a video statement posted to her official social media, saying she “died peacefully” and asking for privacy ahead of a small, private service. No cause was given, though Parton had spoken openly over the past year about a run of health problems.
Her passing came a little over a year after the death of Carl Dean, her husband of nearly six decades, whom she met the day she first arrived in Nashville and married in 1966. Parton had said publicly that grief, alongside her own health setbacks, had worn her down, and she postponed a planned Las Vegas residency as she recovered.
From a Tennessee cabin to the Opry
Born the fourth of twelve children in the Great Smoky Mountains of eastern Tennessee, Parton grew up poor and started performing young, appearing on the Grand Ole Opry stage as a teenager. She left for Nashville the day after finishing high school in 1964, first making her name writing songs for others before stepping into the spotlight herself. Her early break came alongside country star Porter Wagoner, and by the mid-1970s she had launched a fully solo career that would carry her far beyond country radio.
The songs became standards. “Coat of Many Colors” turned a childhood memory of poverty into a hymn to dignity. “Jolene” and “9 to 5” crossed from country into the pop mainstream, the latter becoming her first number one on the pop chart. And “I Will Always Love You,” which she wrote in 1974, reached a second life when Whitney Houston’s 1992 recording became one of the best-selling singles of all time. Parton, who had kept the publishing rights, often spoke about what that decision meant for her independence.
A businesswoman and a benefactor
That independence was central to her story. In an industry long run by men, Parton wrote her own material, owned her catalogue and managed her own affairs, and she was widely regarded as a feminist role model even as she leaned into a carefully built image of big hair, rhinestones and self-deprecating jokes. “It takes a lot of money to look this cheap,” she liked to say.
She built businesses to match the music. Dollywood, the theme park she opened in 1986 in her home region, became a major Tennessee employer and tourist draw. In 1995 she founded the Imagination Library, inspired by her own father, who could not read or write. The programme mails free books each month to young children and has since given away hundreds of millions of them across several countries.
The accolades were vast: eleven Grammy Awards and a Grammy Lifetime Achievement honour, two Academy Award nominations for original song, a Kennedy Center Honor, and, last year, the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award for her charitable work. Two of her songs, “Jolene” and “I Will Always Love You,” were inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.
To generations of fans she was simply “Saint Dolly,” a figure who managed the rare feat of being embraced across political and cultural divides. Her family asked that, in lieu of flowers, donations be made to the Imagination Library.
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