Dolly Parton, who rose from humble beginnings to the greatest heights of American music and became one of the country’s most philanthropic, unifying and beloved stars, died Tuesday at her home in Nashville, according to a family statement. She was 80.
In a career that spanned over half a century, Parton captured the American experience, penning more than 3,000 songs. Those included “Coat of Many Colors,” a quiet ode to her mother, who stitched together garments in the family’s rural Tennessee home. She wrote and performed songs of love and heartbreak, like “Jolene” and “I Will Always Love You.” “9 to 5,” the title track from the movie of the same name, in which Parton also starred, became an anthem for American women and workers.
Parton went on to release 49 albums and win 11 Grammys, and became one of the most successful country crossover artists of all time, scoring regular hits on the pop charts, including “Islands in the Stream,” a duet with Kenny Rogers.
Later in life, she funneled her massive success into philanthropy, founding a library program that has gifted more than 300 million books to children around the world.
But Parton was always, first and foremost, a songwriter. She liked to tell the story of how one of her biggest songs, “I Will Always Love You,” came into the world. A love ballad that soared to ever greater heights once it was covered by Whitney Houston in the 1990s, the song began as a plea to her performing partner, Porter Wagoner, to let her move on from the TV show they appeared on together.
As she made her case to go solo, Wagoner, in her telling, “wasn’t listening to anything” she had to say.
“So I went home and wrote that song, took it back the next morning, and said, ‘Sit down, I need you to hear something.’ So I sang it, and he was crying,” she said. Wagoner relented and Parton, with a song that captured the pain of deep heartbreak, embarked on a solo career almost incomparable in the history of American music.
Born on January 19, 1946 in a one-room cabin in Tennessee, Parton grew up the fourth of 12 children. She described the family as “dirt poor.” Her father did not know how to read.
Music was always a part of the family, especially via her mother, whose father was a preacher who played piano and guitar. “My people were the ones that sang at funerals and weddings and shindigs and anything around locally,” Parton once recounted.
An uncle gave Parton her first guitar as a child. She learned to play when she was just 7 years old and started writing her own songs. “Mama was fascinated with how I could rhyme and write songs about stuff I’d never lived,” Parton said, “but I’d hear them talk.”
Parton moved to Nashville after high school to pursue her music aspirations. On her first day there, she met a man named Carl Thomas Dean outside a laundromat. “I was surprised and delighted that while he talked to me, he looked at my face (a rare thing for me),” she wrote many years later. “He seemed to be genuinely interested in finding out who I was and what I was about.”
Parton signed her first record deal, with Monument Records, in 1965, and married Dean the following year.
Growing ever more beloved in Nashville, Parton in 1967 landed regular appearances on “The Porter Wagoner Show,” a popular televised music variety show that helped her become a household name. She had her first number one hit with “Joshua” in 1971 (“Coat of Many Colors,” released the same year, made it to No. 4). By 1974, after seven years of first being Wagoner’s “pretty little girl” singing in support of him and then sharing the stage with him in many duets, Parton decided it was time to move on and, with a little help from “I Will Always Love You,” struck out on her own. Years later, when the track became a megahit for Whitney Houston as the love theme for the 1992 movie “The Bodyguard,” Parton netted somewhere in the vicinity of $10 million in royalties.
Parton made her feature film debut in 1980’s “9 to 5” alongside Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin, with all three playing office secretaries who plan revenge on their chauvinist boss. Parton agreed to star in the film, provided she could write and perform the theme song. Born out of Parton strumming her acrylic nails, the song “9 to 5” quickly became part of the soundtrack of the women’s liberation movement, especially as it pertained to protections and equal rights in the workplace.
She returned to the big screen in 1982’s “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas” opposite Burt Reynolds and later in 1989’s “Steel Magnolias” — about a strong-willed clan of Southern women featuring Sally Field and Julia Roberts — which introduced her to a new generation of admirers.
Parton grew enormously successful over time, writing tons of hit songs and lending her image to everything from baking mixes to jewelry to cast-iron cookware. In 1986, she bought a theme park in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee and renamed it Dollywood. The park attracts Dolly acolytes from around the world and is also a major source of revenue for the region. The amusement park is Sevier County’s largest employer, according to a 2021 economic impact study, credited with creating more than 23,000 jobs and generating around $1.8 billion annually.
As her success in music and business grew, so did Parton’s humanitarian efforts. Two years after the opening of Dollywood, Parton launched the Dollywood Foundation, which initially sought to lower the high school dropout rate in her home county in Tennessee. After expanding to include the Buddy Program, in which Parton personally pledged to give $500 to every 7th-grade and 8th-grade student if they graduated from high school, she formed the Imagination Library, which has grown into one of the premier early literacy efforts and book-gifting programs in the world. It all linked back to her father, to whom she said the library was in tribute.
In addition to multiple scholarship donations and programs, Parton also mobilized over the years after natural disasters affected both her home state and surrounding areas.
In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, she personally stepped in to help fund the development of the Moderna vaccine and donated $1 million to coronavirus research at Vanderbilt University in Nashville.
Dolly, you will be missed...
