Dolly Parton

American singer-actor

• Born: January 19, 1946
• Place of Birth: Rural Locust Ridge, Sevier County, Tennessee

Parton, a highly successful crossover country and pop singer, brought women to the forefront of country music and also fashioned a successful career in pop music as well as in films and television.

Early Life

A true child of Appalachia, Dolly Parton was born in eastern Tennessee, in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains, the fourth of twelve children. The family’s one-room cabin had no electricity, running water, or indoor plumbing. Parton’s father, Robert Lee Parton, was a farmer and construction worker, and although the Parton family was quite poor, this did not doom the young Parton to an unhappy life. Her mother, Avie Lee Owens Parton, was a singer of ballads and old-time songs, and as a very young child, Parton made up songs for her mother. It was when she was age three that she first invented lyrics for a song about a doll, “Little Tiny Tassletop,” which her mother wrote down.

At the age of nine, Parton took up playing the guitar and banjo on the local radio and, later, on television in nearby Knoxville. She later learned to play the Autoharp, piano, and drums as well. She had appeared on the Grand Ole Opry as a child and thereafter knew what she wanted to do with the rest of her life. Parton was nothing if not determined, so in June 1964, immediately after she graduated from high school—the first member of her family to do so—she took a bus to Nashville to make her name in country music.

Life’s Work

With her move to Nashville, Parton struggled to make herself a star. The way for women to succeed in country music had been demonstrated by Kitty Wells, Patsy Cline, and Loretta Lynn. At first, Parton lived with her uncle, Bill Owens, with whom she wrote songs. She wrote songs for Hank Williams Jr. and Skeeter Davis in late 1965, but her career received a real boost when, in 1966, Bill Phillips made a minor hit of her composition “Put It off Until Tomorrow,” with Parton singing harmony. Soon after, the record company Monumental Records agreed to have her sing country music.

Her performing career took off in 1967, when she had hits with two novelty songs: “Dumb Blonde” and “Something Fishy.” That same year, she joined The Porter Wagoner Show on television as a female soloist and frequent duet partner with country star Porter Wagoner. During this part of her career, Parton sang as a high soprano. There was a sharp contrast between the lyrics she sang, which were about hardship and pain, and her delicate singing voice. In a short time, Porter and Dolly, as they were known to their legions of fans, became country music’s top duo, winning national awards in 1968, 1970, and 1971.

Wagoner helped Parton secure a contract with RCA records, and she began to fashion her career as a solo recording artist. By the mid-1970s she had become a star, singing songs she claimed she had made up while trying to survive growing up in grinding poverty. Her sensitive lyrics and fragile vocal styling proved highly popular, as did her glamorous yet warm and friendly image amplified by towering wigs and skin-tight fashions. She spent some time experimenting to find her own style, and explored a wide variety of themes and sounds. Among her early recordings were conventional hymns, moral tales, and the usual country music stories of love lost. She seemed to be trying everything and anything that had worked for women in country music since the days of Wells, whom Parton had admired.

Many critics point to two of Parton's albums from the early 1970s as important landmarks: Coat of Many Colors (1971) and My Tennessee Mountain Home (1973). The title track “Coat of Many Colors,” which hit number one, carefully tells the tragic story of a rag coat that her mother made for Parton as a poor young child one winter. The song was included as an inductee to the Library of Congress's National Recording Registry in 2011, and the album would earn consideration as one of the greatest albums of all time by various outlets. My Tennessee Mountain Home presents a wonderfully engaging oral history lesson complete with a vision of Nashville (“Down on Music Row”), a pair of musical essays about hard times and grinding poverty (“Daddy’s Working Boots” and “In the Good Old Days”), and a trio of lyrical oral histories (“Dr. Robert F. Thomas,” “I Remember,” and “My Tennessee Mountain Home”).

However, Parton was not satisfied with being atop the country music charts. She set out to map territory that arguably only Cline before her had explored as a country singer—superstardom in pop music. After the smash hit single "Jolene" and the album of the same name in 1974, she broke away from Wagoner (penning the tribute song "I Will Always Love You" in his honor) and took full control over her career. While she continued to find success in the country realm, winning the best female vocalist award from the Country Music Association in 1975 and 1976, she increasingly steered toward an even broader audience. In 1977, when Parton released the album Here You Come Again, the title song (written by veteran New York City pop music writers Barry Mann and Cynthia Weill) rose to number three on the mainstream pop charts and set in motion a whole new phase of her career. The album became her first to sell more than a million copies.

Parton continued to move away from traditional country music and toward mainstream pop. Releases such as duets with Kenny Rogers and the Bee Gees were highly produced and markedly different from the "hillbilly" country sound she had developed with Wagoner. She succeeded in raising her profile to a new level, though eventually she faced some criticism for prioritizing commercial success over her musical roots.

Meanwhile, Parton also set her sights on becoming a film star. In the late 1970s she hired an agent, and soon she was appearing regularly on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. She formally began working in films in 1980, when she gave an engaging performance as a Southern secretary opposite Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda in Nine to Five. Parton also wrote and sang the film’s title song, which earned for her an Oscar nomination, a Grammy Award, and a hit album on both country and pop charts. Her acting performance brought her a Golden Globe nomination.

The film’s hit song “9 to 5” has a big-band introduction and two basic melodies as it liltingly expresses working-class frustration. A full studio backup band (no country music combo here) beats at a disco-like pace. This song, a consummate crossover hit, contains elements of most forms of pop music of the late 1970s and early 1980s, from disco to country-pop. Thereafter, Parton continued to work regularly in Hollywood, starring (and frequently singing as well) in films such as The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1982), Rhinestone (1984), and Steel Magnolias (1989).

As her career prospered, Parton took full control of her business, creating Sandollar Production Company with her former manager Sandy Gilmore, and in 1986 opening her own theme park, Dollywood, and adjacent water park, Dolly’s Splash Country, located in the Smoky Mountains not far from where she was born. Parton regularly graced the covers of Redbook, Vanity Fair, and People magazines. As famous as any Hollywood personality, she continued to find success in the music charts through most of the 1980s. After twenty years recording with RCA, she switched to Columbia Records in 1987.

Parton had her own television series from late September 1987 through May 1988, on the ABC television network. The network brass was looking for someone to revive the variety show genre, which had been moribund since the demise of The Carol Burnett Show. ABC made a two-season, $44 million commitment to Dolly, believing that Parton could cross over the generation gap and make a hit. She sang from her rustic living room, complete with a roaring fire, and Dolly seemed to be the perfect show for the nostalgic Reagan era of the 1980s. However, the glitzy, big-budget hour finished forty-seventh in the ratings for its first and only season. If anything, Parton’s considerable talents and appeal were overused; she appeared in every segment, singing duets with guest stars and performing in comedy skits. Indeed, except for a four-man vocal harmony group called the A Cappellas, Parton was the lone show regular.

Though Parton's career declined somewhat in the 1990s, she continued to work in various fields. In 1991, she starred in a critically acclaimed made-for-television film about abused women, Wild Texas Wind. In 1992, she starred in and helped to produce the film Straight Talk. Parton’s duet with James Ingram in “The Day I Fall in Love,” for the film Beethoven’s 2nd (1993), received an Oscar nomination, and they sang it during the Academy Awards ceremonies.

HarperCollins published her autobiography, Dolly, in the fall of 1994. In addition to her theme park and Sandollar Productions, her business ventures included her own wig factory, a chain of dinner theaters called the Dixie Stampedes, and astute management of the rights to her songs. This close control helped make her a millionaire many times over. For instance, she had turned down an offer by Elvis Presley to include “I Will Always Love You” on an album of his when he demanded that she grant him half of the publishing rights. When Whitney Houston produced a version of the same song in 1992, and it became the best-selling hit ever written and performed by a woman, Parton reaped huge profits because she had retained the rights. Returning to her musical roots, she made the acoustic-oriented album The Grass Is Blue (1999), which won the International Bluegrass Music Association’s Album of the Year award.

Parton continued to give concerts and release new albums and singles, including duets with young country singers such as Randy Travis, Ricky Van Shelton, and Billy Ray Cyrus; some of her songs were produced as videos that aired on VH1 and The Nashville Network. She also teamed up with veteran singers, such as Rod Stewart in 2004, and George Jones in 2005. In 2007, The Very Best of Dolly Parton was issued in two compact-disc volumes. Her composition “Travelin’ Thru,” for the film Transamerica, also was nominated for an Academy Award in 2005, and it won a Golden Globe for Best Original Song. The success proved to be part of a resurgence in her musical career in the twenty-first century.

Parton released Backwoods Barbie—her fortieth studio album—on her own Dolly Records label in 2008. Barbie peaked at number two on the Billboard country and independent album charts. Another album on Dolly Records followed in 2011—Better Day. Her forty-first studio release marked the first time since 1998's Hungry Again that Parton put out an album of entirely original material. In 2011, Parton was awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. Also that year, the Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, location of Parton's Dixie Stampede dinner show reopened as Pirates Voyage: Fun, Fest, and Adventure—a dinner show themed around the local pirate lore. In honor of the grand reopening, the South Carolina General Assembly declared June 3, 2011, to be Dolly Parton Day. Parton also appeared in the musical film Joyful Noise (2012).

In 2014 Parton released her forty-second album, Blue Smoke, featuring duets with Kenny Rogers and Willie Nelson. Her next album, Pure & Simple, followed in 2016. Her forty-fourth album, I Believe in You, was released in 2017. At the same time, she appeared in several television movies based on true events from her own life, including Dolly Parton's Coat of Many Colors (2015) and Dolly Parton's Christmas of Many Colors: Circle of Love (2016). In 2019, she premiered the television series Dolly Parton's Heartstrings, a collection of stories that depict some of Parton's most famous songs. In 2020, she released A Holly Dolly Christmas, her first Christmas album in thirty years, as well as the Netflix musical Dolly Parton's Christmas on the Square, which won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Television Movie. The following year, it was announced that she was working on a debut novel cowritten with best-selling writer James Patterson, which would also be accompanied by an album of original material. Both projects, titled Run, Rose, Run, were released in 2022. In 2024, Parton released her fiftieth studio album, Dolly Parton & Family: Smoky Mountain DNA—Family, Faith & Fables. The album, along with the docuseries announced alongside it, tells the story of Parton's family and their journey from the United Kingdom in the 1600s to their home in the Smoky Mountains, featuring the voices of many of her family members.

Parton earned many major music awards throughout her career, including multiple Grammy Awards, various honors from the Country Music Association (including Entertainer of the Year), and many awards from the Academy of Country Music. She was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1986, and into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1999. In 2006, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts included her among its honors recipients for her lifetime contribution to music. In 2016, Parton was awarded the Willie Nelson Lifetime Achievement Award at the Fiftieth Annual Country Music Association Awards. She was honored with the Governors' Award at the 2018 Emmy Awards. In 2021, she was named one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people. Despite her own protestations following her nomination that she was unworthy, in 2022 she was also inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame; the ceremony saw her performance of a new song written for the occasion. After her induction, Parton announced that she would release a rock album in 2023. Rockstar, a collaborative rock album, was her forty-ninth solo studio album and was well received among critics. It debuted on the Billboard 200 chart at number three, making it her highest-charting studio album.

Parton’s philanthropy also has been recognized. Her Imagination Library, a literacy program that provides books to children, began in Tennessee and spread into other states and Canada. Because of her work with this library, the Association of American Publishers named her to its honors list in 2000, and she received the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval in 2001. She also donated money to wildlife and medical causes. During the COVID-19 pandemic that began in 2020, Parton won attention for a million-dollar donation to Tennessee's Vanderbilt University Medical Center, which was credited with helping in the development of the Moderna vaccine used to combat the spread of the viral disease. She was a vocal proponent of vaccination, even creating a song about it using the tune of her classic hit "Jolene." In recognition of her charitable efforts, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos named her as the newest recipient of a Courage and Civility Award in 2022, which granted her $100 million to put toward her choice of charity.

Parton married Carl Dean, a businessman, in 1966; while shunning the limelight, her husband always played a supportive role in helping her professional career. Although they had no children of their own, the couple helped raise several of Parton’s younger siblings. Parton also became the godmother of singer Miley Cyrus. Parton maintained several residences around the country, including in the Nashville suburb Brentwood, an apartment in her office complex in Nashville itself, multiple residences in the Los Angeles area, a cabin in the Smoky Mountains (her childhood home refurbished), and apartments at Dollywood and in New York City.

Significance

Parton’s life embodied for many the American dream of success, of moving from rags to riches. As the so-called Cinderella of the South, Parton started with almost nothing, save her talent and iron will to succeed. Before she turned thirty years old, she had become a national star. By the time she was forty years old, she was a millionaire. She became a tough businessperson, a talented songwriter and singer, and a television and film star. In the long term, Parton should be remembered as a songwriter whose lyrics expressed key themes in American society, especially from the perspective of women.

A major force in bringing women to the forefront of country music, Parton followed the styling of Wells and Cline. Fashioning a smooth sound to traditional country music instrumentation, she created a popular commercial product intended to appeal to a national pop-music audience. In turn, she inspired a score of country-pop female singers, including Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstadt, with whom she recorded the highly successful album Trio in 1987.

People who know little about country music frequently underestimate Parton. Country stars before her have become famous, but few have matched her range and level of success as a performer. Indeed, she crossed over to become a pop culture icon and an influential figure well beyond the realm of music.

Bibliography

Breznican, Anthony. "The Gospel According to Dolly and Latifah." Entertainment Weekly 13 Jan. 2012: 60.

Brown, Charles T. Music U.S.A.: America’s Country and Western Tradition. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice, 1986.

Bufwack, Mary A., and Robert K. Oermann. Finding Her Voice: The Saga of Women in Country Music. New York: Crown, 1993.

Chappell, Bill. "Dolly Parton Gets $100 Million from Jeff Bezos to Spend on Charity." NPR, 14 Nov. 2022, www.npr.org/2022/11/14/1136454716/dolly-parton-jeff-bezos-imagination-library. Accessed 23 Jan. 2025.

Dunn, Jancee. “Dolly Parton.” Rolling Stone, October 30, 2003.

Grant, Meg. “Dolly Lets Her Hair Down.” Reader’s Digest, January, 2006.

Kingsbury, Paul, and Alan Axelrod, eds. Country: The Music and the Musicians. New York: Abbeville, 1988.

Malone, Bill C. Country Music U.S.A. Rev. ed. Austin: U of Texas P, 1985.

Nash, Alanna. Dolly. Rev. ed. New York: Cooper Square, 2002.

Nicholson, Jessica. “Dolly Parton Slates Family Album ‘Smoky Mountain DNA’ for November.” Billboard, 24 May 2024, www.billboard.com/music/country/dolly-parton-family-album-smoky-mountain-dna-1235691828/. Accessed 23 Jan. 2025.

O’Dair, Barbara. Trouble Girls: The Rolling Stone Book of Women in Rock. New York: Random, 1997.

Parton, Dolly. Dolly. New York: Harper, 1994.

Parton, Dolly. Dream More: Celebrate the Dreamer in You. New York: Riverhead, 2012.

Vinopal, David. "Dolly Parton." AllMusic, 2025, www.allmusic.com/artist/dolly-parton-mn0000175286/biography. Accessed 23 Jan. 2025.

Zuckerman, Suzanne. "Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers." People 7 Mar. 2011: 50.