Dolly Parton, superstar whose songs spoke to millions, dies at 80
- The San Juan Daily Star
- 1 hour ago
- 5 min read
By BILL FRISKICS-WARREN
Dolly Parton, a rhinestone-studded, rags-to-riches daughter of Appalachia who for six decades ruled country music — and much of pop culture — with an outsize personality and down-home wit that enshrined her as one of America’s most cherished originals, died Tuesday in Nashville, Tennessee. She was 80.
Her death was announced in a video posted on social media by her nephew Bryan Seaver. No cause was provided.
From her hardscrabble beginnings to glittering stardom, Parton’s life was the stuff of make-believe. Her songs spoke to millions, confronting privation and loss even as they radiated possibility and hope.
She was, quintessentially, a uniter of people. In 2019, The New York Times ran a story with the headline “Is There Anything We Can All Agree On? Yes: Dolly Parton.”
Parton cannily exploited — and transcended — rural stereotypes and kitsch to fashion a down-home chic entirely her own. In the process, she became an international celebrity who headlined stadium tours, starred in Hollywood movies, built a business empire and appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone. Her at times girlish soprano notwithstanding, she was anything but the “dumb blonde” invoked in the title of her 1966 single.
“I’ve created this and played it up — the makeup, the whole persona,” Parton said, alluding to her plastic surgeries as well as her colloquial “Dollyisms” in a 2002 interview with the Times.
“But this isn’t all I am,” she added. “It’s not even most of what I am. Hopefully people can see beneath the hair to know there’s a brain, beneath the boobs to know there’s a heart and behind all the other stuff to know there’s some talent.”
Inducted into both the country music and rock ’n’ roll halls of fame, Parton was the top-ranking female singer on country radio from 1967 to 1993, and had a total of 25 No. 1 country singles.
Her early breakthrough came in 1967 when she was hired as the “girl singer” on “The Porter Wagoner Show,” a syndicated country music television variety program. Several years later, she had No. 1 country hits with records including “Jolene” and “I Will Always Love You.”
Both songs were among about 3,000 titles she published in her lifetime, hundreds of which have been recorded by other artists, including Tina Turner, Norah Jones, the White Stripes, Merle Haggard, RuPaul and Whitney Houston.
With Loretta Lynn and Tammy Wynette, Parton blazed a trail for women in country music, inspiring such contemporaries as Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris, as well as latter-day hitmakers including Carrie Underwood, Kacey Musgraves and Taylor Swift.
Stylistically, Parton’s music ran the gamut: mountain bluegrass and soul-inflected countrypolitan, disco-era pop and covers of classic rock touchstones written by Neil Young and Led Zeppelin — all of it rendered indelible by her irrepressible spirit and alternately keening and gossamer soprano drawl.
In “Coat of Many Colors,” maybe her most beloved original, Parton plumbed childhood feelings of pride and humiliation. The coat in question — quilted from rags and originally a source of delight and the expression of a mother’s love — becomes an object of ridicule at school.
So with patches on my britches
And holes in both my shoes,
In my coat of many colors
I hurried off to school
Just to find the others laughing
And making fun of me
In my coat of many colors
My Mama made for me
“That little song is like a world of things,” Parton said of “Coat of Many Colors” in “Dolly Parton, Songteller: My Life in Lyrics” (2020), written with Robert K. Oermann. “It teaches about bullying, about love, about acceptance, about good parents.”
Empathy was a hallmark of Parton’s songwriting, perhaps nowhere so much as in “Down From Dover” and “Daddy Come Get Me,” harrowing Southern gothic ballads about teen pregnancy and how patriarchy blames and victimizes young women.
Assertive women populated Parton’s songs, notably in the workplace anthem “9 to 5.”
“It’s a rich man’s game / No matter what they call it / And you spend your life / Putting money in his wallet,” Parton sang in that theme song for the 1980 pink-collar comedy “9 to 5,” in which she also starred alongside Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin.
Parton would go on to star in other films, among them “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas” (1982), with Burt Reynolds; “Steel Magnolias” (1989), with Julia Roberts and Shirley MacLaine; and “Straight Talk” (1992), with James Woods.
In 1976, she became the first woman in country music to host her own syndicated TV series; a decade later, she had an hourlong variety show on ABC. But for all her reach and command as an entertainer, Parton viewed herself, first and foremost, as a songwriter.
Dolly Rebecca Parton was born Jan. 19, 1946, the fourth of 12 children of Robert Lee and Avie Lee (Owens) Parton, in a one-room cabin on the banks of the Little Pigeon River in Sevier County, Tennessee. Her father was a tenant farmer, and her mother was a homemaker who sang old Anglo-Celtic ballads and hymns while doing housework.
Parton may have grown up without plumbing, heat, electricity and other modern conveniences, but she always insisted that she also grew up happy, and that music offered her a refuge from want.
She started singing on radio and on TV at 10, on the “Cas Walker Farm and Home Hour” in Knoxville, Tennessee, securing bookings with the help of her uncle Bill Owens, who also bought her her first guitar. The two would go on to write many songs together.
Parton made her recording debut in 1959, the same year she made her first appearance at the Grand Ole Opry. In 1962, she signed a songwriting deal with Tree International Publishing (now part of Sony Music Publishing). Two years later, she became the first person in her family to graduate from high school.
In 1966, Parton married Carl Dean, an asphalt contractor who shunned the limelight. The couple had met two years earlier, at a laundromat in Nashville, when Parton was 18. Dean died in 2025.
Parton is survived by six of her siblings: Willadeene Parton, Robert Lee Parton Jr., Stella Parton, Cassie Parton, Freida Parton and Rachel Ann Parton George.
After her 1980 recording of “9 to 5” earned her two Grammy Awards and an Oscar nomination, Parton turned her attention to movies, TV appearances and the development, in the mid-1980s, of Dollywood, her Smoky Mountain theme park, among other business ventures.
She published her memoir, “Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business,” a New York Times bestseller, in 1994. The next year, she established the Imagination Library, a philanthropic endeavor through which more than 200 million books have been distributed to babies and young children. A show about her life, “Dolly: A True Original Musical,” is scheduled to open on Broadway in early 2027.
Parton was nominated for more than 50 Grammy Awards, 10 of which she won, along with being recognized for lifetime achievement by the Recording Academy in 2011.
Parton was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1999 and the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2001, and was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 2005. In 2022, she was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
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