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Dolly Parton performs during "Dolly: An Original Musical" fireside chat and press conference at The Fisher Center for the Performing Arts on January 28, 2025 in Nashville, Tennessee.
Country
Dolly Parton, One of Country Music’s Biggest & Brightest Icons, Dies at 80
Parton was one of the most influential songwriters to hit Nashville -- or the world.
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Dolly Parton, the extraordinarily versatile singer and songwriter who built up her artistic credibility and commercial fortunes in both country and pop music over more than half a century, has died in Nashville on Tuesday (Aug. 25) at the age of 80.
Parton had been mostly out of sight eye for the past year following a struggle with unspecified health issues that forced the “9 to 5” singer/songwriter to curtail public appearances and postpone, then cancel her planned 2025 Las Vegas residency. Her death came 17 months after the passing of her husband of nearly 60 years, Carl Dean, who died on March 3, 2025 at age 82.
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“At Dolly’s request, a small, private service will be held for immediate family,” read a press release announcing the awful news. “Dolly’s fans and friends from around the world are encouraged to pay tribute to Dolly on social media by tagging @DollyParton or by leaving a message at www.dollyparton.com. In lieu of flowers the family asks for donations to be made to Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library at www.imaginationlibrary.com.” Her nephew, Bryan Seaver, shared a message on Instagram after her passing.
“The magic with me,” Parton liked to say, “is that I look completely false when I’m completely real.” She was famous for her wall of self-conscious artifice — she modeled her done-to-the-nines appearance on a prostitute in her hometown, and she always had a self-teasing quip at the ready. But she was also a magnificent singer, with an aching soprano trill that never left her, and a virtuosic songwriter whose work was adopted by artists from Whitney Houston (“I Will Always Love You”) to the White Stripes (“Jolene”).
Parton, who Billboard editors named the top country artist of all time in 2024, was a cultural and commercial force. She landed 49 albums in the top 10 on the Billboard Country Albums chart, the most of any woman. She also scored more No. 1s on the Hot Country Songs chart for a woman artist at 25.
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Born January 19, 1946, to a poor family in Sevier County, Tenn., Parton started recording at an early age: her first single, “Puppy Love,” appeared when she was 13. At 18, she moved to Nashville, where she became a professional country songwriter, while also recording a few minor pop singles. In 1966, she married Dean, who kept a famously low profile for the rest of her career; her childhood friend Judy Ogle, meanwhile, remained inseparable from her. “Those two people actually have been the rock,” she told The Guardian in 2014.
Parton found her groove as a country performer in 1967, replacing Norma Jean as Porter Wagoner‘s co-host and duet partner on his weekly TV show. (Wagoner and Parton would go on to place 20 duets on the country charts.) After her first Hot Country Songs charting hit, “Dumb Blonde,” in 1966, she had a number of songs that reached the 40s and 50s, until her breakthrough as a solo artist, a 1970 cover of Jimmie Rodgers‘ “Mule Skinner Blues,” which reached No. 3). Over the next few years, her string of hits — many of which she wrote, including “Coat of Many Colors” and “My Tennessee Mountain Home” — established her persona: a passionate sentimentalist, shaped by the rural poverty of her childhood. (She went on to release at least one Top Ten Country single every year through 1985.) 1973’s heartbreaking true-live tale of romantic jealousy, “Jolene,” which would become her most-covered song, crossed over to the Hot 100, and gave her a taste of broader pop stardom.
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In 1974, she wrote and recorded a magnificent farewell to Wagoner, whose organization she was leaving: “I Will Always Love You” was first a No. 1 country single for her in 1974, and again when she re-recorded it for the soundtrack of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas in 1982. (Then, of course, there was Houston’s monumental 1992 cover — followed by Parton’s third country-hit recording of the song, as a duet with Vince Gill in 1995.) She famously turned down Elvis Presley’s request to record the song because Col. Tom Parker insisted on Parton giving up half of her publishing royalties. “That was one of the hardest things I ever had to do because I loved Elvis,” Parton told Billboard in a 2020 cover story.
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“I Will Always Love You” was also the closing theme of Dolly!, the syndicated variety show she hosted in 1976 and 1977. The series was a springboard for her concerted efforts to expand her audience: she had her first Top Ten pop hit in 1977 with “Here You Come Again,” and even hit the disco chart with 1978’s “Baby I’m Burning.” Her 1981 theme song from the movie 9 to 5 (in which she also starred) reached #1 on the country, pop and adult-contemporary charts, a feat she repeated with 1983’s Kenny Rogers duet “Islands in the Stream,” written for them by the Bee Gees.
As her songwriting output slowed (and the sound of country music passed her by) in the mid-’80s, Parton branched out. In 1986, she took over the Pigeon Forge, Tenn., theme park Silver Dollar City, and reopened it as Dollywood (with a replica of her childhood home). Trio, her 1987 collaboration with Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris, was a neo-traditionalist setting for the three singers’ exquisite harmonies, and a platinum hit.
After her appearance in the 1989 film Steel Magnolias, Parton returned her focus to recording country music, and rarely performed live for most of the ’90s; the appearance of her 1994 memoir, Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business, signaled a move toward trading on her reputation. Still, having spent her early career as a professional nostalgic smoothed her path to her retro-minded projects of that decade: 1993’s Honky Tonk Angels, a collaboration with her contemporaries Loretta Lynn and Tammy Wynette, and 1999’s Trio II both went gold. At the end of the ’90s, she reinvented herself (again) as an acoustic-leaning bluegrass revivalist with the Grammy-winning album The Grass Is Blue, followed by 2001’s Little Sparrow and 2002’s Halos & Horns.
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Parton returned to the road in the 2000s, touring extensively in North America and Europe, and headlining at England’s Glastonbury Festival in 2014. As a new generation of songwriters and performers embraced her as a pioneer for women’s roles in music (a 2003 tribute album, Just Because I’m a Woman: Songs of Dolly Parton, included contributions by Norah Jones, Shania Twain and Melissa Etheridge), her entrepreneurial streak extended to launching her own label: Dolly Records debuted with 2008’s Backwoods Barbie.
The 2015 TV movie Dolly Parton’s Coat of Many Colors was based on her autobiographical 1971 rags-to-riches song; the same year, Dollywood’s DreamMore Resort expanded her theme park. Even into her seventies, Parton’s voice, persona and appearance remained remarkably close to what they’d been in the earliest years of her career — she presented her penchant for plastic surgery as part of the reward for the countless cups of ambition she’d poured herself. As another one of her favorite one-liners put it, “it takes a lot of money to look this cheap.”
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Parton experienced a major resurgence late in her career, including reaching a Billboard 200 career high in 2023 when Rockstar, largely a collection of rock covers, debuted at No. 3, her pinnacle on the all-genre chart. The album, which featured contributions from Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Sting, goddaughter Miley Cyrus, Lizzo, Elton John and others, also debuted at No. 1 on Top Album Sales chart, providing her with her biggest sales week in the modern era. It also expanded the genres she fearlessly explored. Though primarily lauded as a country artist, she made detours (with albums and/or songs) into such genres as Americana/folk, bluegrass, children’s music, Christian, dance/electronic and pop.
Ever one to smartly make use of opportunities, the rock album came about after Parton was placed on the 2022 ballot for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, an honor she felt she didn’t deserve, which prompted a request to be taken off the ballot. However, after she was elected for induction, she told Billboard she now felt she had to make a rock album. “People usually [say] ‘Dolly rocks’ or ‘you rock’ or ‘you’re a rock star.’I thought they just meant it that I was cool and I took that as a great compliment,” she said. “But now I’m going to have to take it literally!”
Nielsen ranked Parton the No. 1 most marketable country artist in the world in 2017 and she and manager Danny Nozell used her recognition to license her name for dozens of products from cake mix to greeting cards.
Parton used her wealth to fund the Imagination Library, which provides books monthly to children from birth to age 5 and has donated over 150 million books to date. In the early days of COVID, she also donated $1 million to Vanderbilt University Medical Center, which helped fund the Moderna vaccine.
Though famously apolitical, she didn’t hesitate to speak her mind when it came to equality. In the 2020 cover story, during the height of the Black Lives Matter protests, she told Billboard, “I understand people having to make themselves known and felt and seen,” Parton says. “And of course Black lives matter. Do we think our little white asses are the only ones that matter? No!”
Similarly, she has spoken out numerous times in support of the LGBTQIA community. Parton earned her second Oscar nomination in 2005 for the song “Travelin’ Thru,” which she wrote for the movie Transamerica, a road comedy about a trans woman (Felicity Huffman), who goes on a road trip with her estranged son (Kevin Zegers). Over the course of her 70-year career, Parton was nominated for 55 Grammys and won 11, including the Lifetime Achievement Award in 2011.
Well into her 70s, Parton continued to relish the chance to collaborate with her musical disciples and fellow divas, recording “Gonna Be You” with the Go-Gos’ Belinda Carlisle, Cyndi Lauper, Blondie’s Debbie Harry and Gloria Estefan for the 80 For Brady movie, as well as hopping on the Sabrina Carpenter hit “Please Please Pleasehttps://www.billboard.com/music/chart-beat/sabrina-carpent.../” on the deluxe edition of the singer’s Short n’ Sweet album in 2025.
In a testament to her heartbreak and lifelong love affair with Dean, Parton released the touching single “If You Hadn’t Been There” in March 2025 following her husband’s death. Parton had been scheduled to headline a six-show Las Vegas residency at Caesars Palace in late 2025, but postponed it for a year due to unspecified health issues; the run was canceled in May 2026 due to ongoing treatment.
Parton saw her life as a calling as much as a musical career. “As the scripture says, ‘To whom much is given, much is required.’ So I look at my life with that every day and think that God expects it of me,” she told Billboard in 2020. “I expect it of myself, and I think people expect it of me. If I can be an inspiration, then I want to be that. That makes me feel good.”
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