Dolly Parton, the beloved country-music superstar known for writing about the lives of regular people in more than 3,000 songs and, in later years, for giving away more than 300 million books to children around the world, has died in Nashville. She was 80. Parton had recently shared updates about health issues she’d been dealing with since the death of her husband Carl Dean last year, and her representatives told People that her death in Nashville came after a “brief battle with cancer.” Her nephew and bodyguard Bryan Seaver announced her death in an Instagram video posted to her account on Aug. 25, saying, “Dolly has lived in the light and is in the arms of Jesus, surely met by Carl, her parents, and countless others who have watched her and longed for her to meet them in the heavens.”
To her fans around the world, she was Saint Dolly—the American godmother who channeled the sorrows of everyday life into song, wrapping ugly truths in pretty packages. Though she was described by music journalist Robert Oermann as “the Mozart of our times,” Parton’s larger-than-life hair, excess in rhinestones, surgical implants, and cosmetic work concealed the iron will through which she confronted the day’s realities with her craft. Most importantly, she wrote and sang with a woman’s voice and heart about topics that uniquely touched her gender. Her songs include stories of stillborn births (“Down From Dover”), suicide (“The Bridge”), shame (“Just Because I’m a Woman”), abuse (“A Gamble Either Way”), adoption (“Doing This for Your Sake”), isolation (“Two Doors Down”), mental institutions (“Daddy Come and Get Me”), and prostitution (“The Bargain Store”).
I saw Parton play live in concert during her Pure & Simple Tour in October 2016, a month before the most divisive election in American collective memory, and a year before I began reporting a podcast on her life called Dolly Parton’s America. At the time, I was looking for someone or something to believe in. On the television and in the news, hatred from both sides of the American political aisle had never seemed more grotesque, but at Parton’s show, we all sang together. Parton visited more than 60 cities that summer and fall. Looking back, I can’t help but wonder if she knew it would be something of a healing tour, the last of its kind she would do. When I asked Parton what “Dolly Parton’s America” meant to her, she responded that her perspective wasn’t limited by borders, that it was Dolly Parton’s World: “I just think we need to love one another. I think we need to try a little harder. We need to be a little kinder. We need to be a little smarter. We need to have more love and compassion.” The last time I saw her, she told me she was planning a comedy album. She also said that, unlike other artists of her stature for whom posthumously released music has been a point of contention, she’d recorded many more songs of hope she’d put away in a vault, to be released throughout the hundred years following her death.
Parton was a genius from humble origins. Because of them, she remained vulnerable, even relatable, in the public eye. Many wealthy folk prefer to be compassionate from on-high, if at all, never getting their feet wet or hands dirty. Parton rolled in the mud. She claimed she modeled her look on “the town trash whore,” whom she thought was “beautiful.” She dressed in a way that was her idea of glamour: yellow hair piled atop her head, bright red lipstick and nails, high-heeled shoes, and a tight skirt. “I thought [that woman] was the prettiest thing I’d ever seen,” she once said on Ellen. “So I grew up to look just like her!”
Once Parton achieved a certain level of fame, her body became a punchline for the late-night circuit. When two male scientists made the world’s first cloned sheep, in 1996, they named it after Parton for its “large mammaries.” Parton laughed the cracks off with quips of her own (“I don’t know if I’m supporting them, or they’re supporting me”). For the Dolly podcast series, I asked Parton once about whether she thought her look stopped journalists, mostly men in the time she was coming up, from taking her work seriously, or viewing her songwriting as equally important to her work as a performer. She shrugged off the question: “Sometimes you have to look like Jezebel in order to get some angelic things done in the world.”
There are countless examples of remarkable women erased by history, but Parton survived her own story long enough to tell it. Her cycle of resurrections, the highs and lows, didn’t seem to change her much over the years, even as the highs garnered her over half a billion dollars.
Dolly Rebecca Parton arrived on Jan. 19, 1946, in an unheated cabin about an hour outside of Knoxville, Tenn., atop the Smoky Mountains. Her parents paid the doctor who trekked to their home to deliver her with a sack of cornmeal. The fourth of 12 children—as she put it, “Mama always had one on her or in her”—the kids slept three or four to a bed. Their only modern convenience was a battery-powered radio. Her childhood home had no indoor plumbing, electricity, or running water. She later compared it to moving from "the Dark Ages into the light ages."
Dolly Parton performs at the Roxy in West Hollywood in 1977. Barr Brandon—MediaPunch/IPX/AP
She grew up surrounded by pines, butterflies, creeks, and neon-green moss. As her father worked from sunup to sundown as a farmer, her mother sang the children Irish and Welsh folk songs “from the Old World,” passed down through the generations. One day, Parton fashioned a makeshift microphone by putting a tobacco stick into the ground and placing a tin can on top, performing a show of her own. By the age of 5, she had written her very first song, “Little Tiny Tasseltop,” about a corncob doll. By 8, her Uncle Bill Owens, who wrote songs and performed across East Tennessee billed as “Little Billy Earl with the Split Curl,” began to teach her the guitar. They sang together at supermarket openings, rallies, fairs, and talent contests. By age 10, he arranged for her to appear on the Cas Walker Show.
Walker was a coon hunter who’d started a local radio-cum-television show to promote his grocery stores. This was Parton’s first big break. At 11, Parton got her first recorded song, “Puppy Love,” co-written with Owens, on the radio, and at 13, she told Johnny Cash she wanted to sing at the Grand Ole Opry. So when an older Opry performer gave up his spot one Saturday night in 1959, Parton got her chance to sing at the historic venue. Cash himself introduced her to the crowd of 2,000. “We’ve got a little girl here from up in East Tennessee,” he said. “Her daddy’s listening to the radio at home, and she’s gonna be in real trouble if she doesn’t sing tonight, so let’s bring her out here!” That night she received three encores.
The day after she graduated high school, Parton took a Greyhound 180 miles to Nashville. For weeks she lived off soups made of ketchup and mustard and food left in the halls of hotels. But these scrappy days quickly paid off. She landed a record deal at 19, and soon after, a husband: a handsome, quiet man named Carl Dean, whom she met at the Wishy Washy Laundromat and would remain married to until his death in 2025. When her record company’s president encouraged her to delay marriage in order to keep her broad appeal to a male audience, she married Dean anyway, in secret. It was the early 1960s. There were obstacles to women owning a home, having credit in their own name, and taking out loans, so Parton moved like perfume, wafting through the world of men while always doing things her own way.
Parton poses for press photographers at a Tokyo press conference ahead of a Japan tour, July 23, 1979. Tsugufumi Matsumoto—AP
When her prophetic single “Dumb Blonde" hit the airwaves in 1966, it captured the attention of a star with the No. 1 syndicated country-music television show in the nation. Porter Wagoner, known for his lavender Nudie suits covered with sequins and rhinestones, had been looking for a new “girl singer.” The pair’s love-hate working relationship kicked off quickly. On her very first stint on the show, Wagoner cut off a shy Parton before she even finished singing. Alternately fighting and writing, they produced hit after hit, and a bolder, louder Parton began to emerge. Wagoner made her a better performer, while she made him a better songwriter. Their partnership also sharpened her already acute sense of humor. She said of her seven years with him, “If I got myself in a spot where it looked like I couldn’t walk my way out of it, or move my way out of it, I would joke my way out of it.”
The Wagoner band worked constantly, and Parton learned how to hold her own onstage and in the studio. Early on in her recording career, she’d been panned as the ditz with “a Minnie Mouse voice,” but she came into a new level of mastery during this phase. While recording “The Mule Skinner Blues” in 1970, Parton took the reins; she sang the first note so long that the band could not begin to play until they followed her lead. The record earned her her first individual Grammy nomination for Best Female Country Vocal Performance in 1970; she received 11 Grammys over the course of her career.
During her partnership with Wagoner, she wrote many of her signature hits, including “The Coat of Many Colors,” “Joshua,” and both “Jolene” and “I Will Always Love You.” When Parton decided it was finally time to leave Wagoner’s show, he sued her for $3 million, claiming she’d breached their contract. Famously, the lyrics to “I Will Always Love You” served as her way of letting him know how much she appreciated him. To avoid a lengthy legal battle, they settled for $1 million. Parton didn’t have the money, so she paid him in installments over the years.
