Tribute to Dolly Parton’s rise from ‘rags to rhinestones’ — country music singer and cultural icon, dies at 80

In a life described as taking her from “rags to rhinestones,” Dolly Parton and her blond bouffant — that mountain of hair even taller, it sometimes seemed, than the Tennessee foothills where she first strummed a guitar — carved out a singular place in American life.

Like almost everything about Dolly, as she was universally known, that place was big — big enough to contain her devotees in the country music world, the Appalachian poor who saw their lives reflected in the lyrics of her thousands of original songs, the working women she cheered on in the 1980 Hollywood comedy “9 to 5” and the children she reached through her Imagination Library literacy program.

A centrepiece of her wide-ranging philanthropy, the initiative has provided more than 300 million free books to young readers around the world.

Parton, 80, died Tuesday in Nashville. A statement from Parton’s publicist said she “died peacefully,” though a cause of death was not given.

When she died, Parton was an international superstar and an unlikely feminist heroine, instantly recognisable for her profusion of sequins and the dramatic proportions of her bust, often accentuated by her skin-tight clothes.

She took no offense, she said, when people made note of her figure. Dolly, the cloned sheep who made global headlines in the 1990s, was so named because her DNA came from a mammary cell.

“I don’t look real,” Parton conceded. But her taste for glitter and gilt “came from a very serious place,” she told The Washington Post — “just a poor country girl’s idea of glamour”.

One of 12 children whose father supported them, in part, by selling moonshine, Parton was 5 or 6 years old when she wrote her first song.

By the end of her career, she had written more than 3000 — sometimes scribbling lyrics on dry cleaning receipts and other scraps of paper in her incessant creative drive — and sold more than 100 million records with hits such as Jolene, My Tennessee Mountain Home, Coat of Many Colors and I Will Always Love You.

She won 11 Grammy Awards, as well as one for lifetime achievement in 2011, was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1999, received a Living Legend medal from the Library of Congress in 2004 and was awarded the Kennedy Center Honours in 2006. In 2022, she was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

Parton parlayed her musical success into a movie career, starring with Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin in “9 to 5” as overworked office employees who seek vengeance — and fair pay — from their sexist boss.

Parton later played a brothel owner in the musical comedy The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1982) and a Southern beautician, aka “glamour technician,” in the three-hanky film Steel Magnolias (1989).

In a manner that evoked the entrepreneurial spirit of Walt Disney, Parton conjured a place where fans could escape into her world, opening the Dollywood theme park in 1986.

Located in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, it became one of the most popular tourist destinations in the state and a boon to the beleaguered local economy.

Dollywood drew millions of visitors with rides and attractions, including a replica of the two-room cabin where Parton grew up in a holler of the Great Smoky Mountains.

Along with her music royalties, proceeds from the theme park helped make Parton one of the richest self-made women in the United States, with a fortune estimated by Forbes magazine last year at $450 million.

Described at times as a “secular saint,” Parton engendered admiration verging on veneration with philanthropic efforts including the Imagination Library, a program launched in her native Sevier County, Tennessee, in 1995.

She undertook the project, she said, to spare others the struggles that illiteracy visited upon her father.

In 2016, when wildfires ravaged her region of Tennessee, Parton announced that she would provide monthly stipends of $1000 to families left homeless by the disaster.

The initiative grew to support 900 families for six months, according to Blue Ridge Public Radio, and delivered a total of $12.5 million to the people of Sevier County.

Amid the coronavirus pandemic, Parton donated $1 million to Vanderbilt University Medical Centre in Nashville, which helped develop the Moderna vaccine.

When she received the Moderna jab in March 2021, she did so on camera, telling viewers that, at 75, she was “old enough” and “smart enough” to get it.

For the occasion, she penned and sang new lyrics to the tune of Jolene: “Vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, vaaa-cine. I’m begging of you, please don’t hesitate . . .”

In 2022, the parent company of Dollywood announced that it would pay for the tuition, fees and books for any employee who sought higher education.

The same year, Parton received the Courage and Civility Award from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and his then-partner and now wife, Lauren Sánchez, a recognition that included $100 million for Parton to distribute to charity in whatever manner she chose. (Bezos is the owner of The Washington Post.)

Parton’s phenomenal popularity extended across the political spectrum and grew over the years to include feminists who once would have disdained Parton for her distinctly not women’s liberationist outward appearance.

She was the rare celebrity treated as royalty both at the Grand Ole Opry and among drag queens, some of whom “look more like me than I do,” she joked.

Parton insisted that she didn’t “do politics,” telling Jad Abumrad, host of the 2019 podcast series Dolly Parton’s America, that “I have too many fans on both sides of the fence”.

It sometimes seemed, Abumrad said in the podcast, that Parton offered Americans a rare point of consensus: Who doesn’t love Dolly?

The recognition, journalist Sarah Smarsh argued in her 2020 book, “She Come By It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs,” was in many ways long overdue.

“Many of her twenty-first-century fans are . . . ‘discovering’ what was there all along, in plain sight but for the blinders of patriarchy: Parton’s artistry, intellectual depth, and self-fashioned paradoxes that slyly comment on our country’s long-denied caste system (looking ‘cheap,’ say, while by all accounts acting with pure class).”

“Parton projected a sweetly defiant self-possession throughout her career in a man’s world,” Smarsh continued.

“One doesn’t get the impression that she expected or cared whether such validation would come. But it’s a magnificent thing to witness — an atonement countless women have deserved but never received, flowering while the woman is alive to see it.”

‘Town tramp’

Dolly Rebecca Parton was born near Sevierville, Tennessee, on January 19, 1946.

Her father, Robert Lee Parton, was a sharecropper who later owned a parcel of land. Her mother, Avie Lee Owens, was the daughter of a Pentecostal preacher and married at 15.

The Parton family’s cabin had no indoor plumbing or electricity. The children had no toys. But they did have fiddles and guitars.

They also had love, Parton often recounted. Onstage decades later, she would enter into reveries recalling her parents and the contentment they provided amid deprivation and tragedy including the death of her baby brother.

Parton grew up wearing dresses fashioned from feed sacks and, in the colder months, a garment that inspired her hit 1971 song Coat of Many Colors, about a child who proudly wears to school a coat her mother had sewn from rags. The song went:

“Although we had no money,

“I was rich as I could be,

“In my coat of many colours,

“My mama made for me.”

Ridiculing her for her attire, Parton’s classmates locked her in a coat closet, an experience that she said scarred her but later fed her compassion as a songwriter.

She traced her appearance as a performer — the peroxide-blond hair, the heavy makeup and a body-hugging wardrobe that she said invited whippings from her father — to a woman from her childhood she described as a “town tramp”.

The woman had “yellow hair piled on top of her head, red lipstick, her eyes all painted up, and her clothes all tight and flashy,” Parton told the magazine Southern Living.

“I just thought she was the prettiest thing I’d ever seen. And then when everybody said, ‘Oh, she’s just trash,’ I thought, ‘That’s what I’m going to be when I grow up! Trash!’”

Musically inclined from a young age, Parton began playing what she described as a “busted-up mandolin” when she was 6.

Two years later, an uncle, Bill Owens, provided her first real guitar. He was a band musician and worked with Parton on her first recording, Puppy Love, released in 1959.

He also helped arrange for his niece to appear on a local radio program, which put her on the path to her debut at the Grand Ole Opry when she was 13.

Even before then, Parton said, she had fallen in love with the public.

“This was what I had always wanted — no, needed,” she wrote in the memoir Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business (1994).

“It was the attention I had longed for. I knew what they were giving me. Now I had confidence in what I had to give them.”

Parton was the first member of her family to receive a high school diploma. The day after graduation, she left for Nashville on a Greyhound bus with all of her belongings loaded in grocery bags.

She “was soon so broke she fed herself by stealing food from grocery stores or roaming hotel hallways in search of room-service trays left outside doors for pickup,” Smarsh wrote.

But in 1965, Parton signed a contract with Monument Records. One of her first hits was a song that she did not write but that accurately reflected her worldview. The song was called Dumb Blonde, and it went:

“Just because I’m blond,

“Don’t think I’m dumb,

“’Cause this dumb blonde ain’t nobody’s fool.”

In 1966, Parton was married to Carl Dean, the owner of a Tennessee asphalt business; they had met on her first day in Nashville outside the Wishy Washy Laundromat.

Dean, described by Parton as a “loner” who preferred rock to her style of music, rarely appeared with his wife in public and continued running his company well after she was an established star.

Parton and her husband, who died in 2025, had no children. A complete list of survivors was not immediately available.

Her brother Floyd Parton, who died in 2018, wrote several songs with Parton. Her sister Stella Parton became a singer, as did her brother Randy Parton. Her sister Rachel Parton George became an actress, appearing in a TV version of “9 to 5” (as Rachel Dennison).

‘Hello, I’m Dolly’

Parton developed her signature appearance, bewigged and bespangled, early in her career. Even some of her instruments — she played guitar, dulcimer and flute, among others — sported rhinestones.

“You’d be surprised how much it costs to look this cheap,” Parton quipped, referring not only to her glitzy accoutrements but also to her numerous cosmetic surgeries “to fix whatever’s saggin’, baggin’ or draggin’.”

Parton’s debut solo album, Hello, I’m Dolly, was released in 1967. Months later, she joined the pompadoured, Nudie suit-sporting country music singer Porter Wagoner on The Porter Wagoner Show.

At first, many TV viewers resented the absence of her predecessor, Norma Jean. But they soon came around to Parton, and the show’s wide syndication catapulted her and her songs to national renown.

“Her voice is an amazement,” journalist Chris Chase wrote in the New York Times in 1976.

“In ‘Love Is Like a Butterfly,’ Dolly’s work is itself as sheer and delicate as a butterfly’s wings . . . while in ‘Travelin’ Man,’ she hoots and hollers and drives and mocks. Sometimes she hits a high note and it breaks into pieces, and a little shower of crystally sounds comes down; sometimes she hits low notes soft and furry and filled with loneliness. Her voice can quiver . . . twang . . . throb . . . lift . . . It is almost always true and sweet.”

During their seven-year professional partnership, Parton and Wagoner became one of the best known duos in country music, with hits including The Last Thing on My Mind, which appeared on their 1968 duet album Just Between You and Me, and Please Don’t Stop Loving Me.

Three times they were named vocal group or duo of the year by the Country Music Association.

In the meantime, Parton continued pursuing a solo career.

Having left Monument Records for RCA, she released the single Just Because I’m a Woman in 1968, a lament about double standards (“My mistakes are no worse than yours / Just because I’m a woman”) that Parton said was inspired by her husband’s dejection when he learned that she had been with other men before their marriage.

In 1971, she had her first No. 1 hit with the yodelling Joshua. In 1975 and again in 1976, she was the CMA’s female vocalist of the year.

As Parton became increasingly successful on her own, her partnership with Wagoner degenerated into an arrangement that she likened to indentured servitude.

Despite what by many accounts was Wagoner’s controlling behaviour, she outstayed her five-year contract with him by two years — and then, in 1974, decided she was done.

I Will Always Love You, with its lines about “bittersweet memories,” was her goodbye to him.

“The song came straight from the bottom of my heart,” Parton later reflected in the book Dolly Parton, Songteller: My Life in Lyrics (written with Robert K. Oermann).

“All of those feelings, all of those thoughts, all of those things we had been through, all the things we had been to each other, all of the things we had done to each other, all of that was in one song. I was so emotional I was crying when I was writing it.”

Parton’s partnership with Wagoner was long fodder for tabloids, but neither ever confirmed a romantic element to their relationship.

After Parton left his show, Wagoner sued her, essentially claiming that she owed her career to his tutelage.

Rather than fight the suit, Ms. Parton settled for $1 million, which she paid off over years.

She and Wagoner were said to have reconciled, although she said the lawsuit “broke both our hearts”.

I Will Always Love You went on to become a megahit covered by dozens of musicians, most notably Whitney Houston for the soundtrack of the 1992 movie The Bodyguard.

Elvis Presley asked to record it but demanded half the publishing rights.

In one of her most consequential business moves, Parton refused to relinquish her copyright — a decision, she noted years later, that eventually made her enough money to buy Graceland, Presley’s Memphis estate, if she had wanted to buy it.

Parton wrote another of her most famous songs, the No. 1 hit Jolene (1973) around the time that she penned I Will Always Love You — possibly on the same day, she later speculated, reviewing records from the time.

Loosely inspired by her husband’s flirtatious encounter with a bank employee, the song features a memorable chorus: “Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, I’m begging of you, please don’t take my man.”

It was recorded hundreds of times and, along with Coat of Many Colors and I Will Always Love You, was entered into the Grammy Hall of Fame.

‘The way of the mountains’

In 1976, Parton began appearing in a syndicated television show, Dolly. The next year, she released her first self-produced album, New Harvest . . . First Gathering, which included the hit song Light of a Clear Blue Morning. She described it as her “song of deliverance”:

“It’s been a long dark night,

“And I’ve been a waitin’ for the morning.

“It’s been a long hard fight,

“But I see a brand new day a-dawning.”

In 1978, Here You Come Again (the song appeared on an album by the same name) brought Parton her first Grammy Award, for best country vocal performance by a woman.

Many of Ms. Parton’s songs were ballads that she self-deprecatingly described as “sad-ass songs”.

The Bridge (1968) tells the story of a pregnant woman, unmarried and abandoned by her lover, who returns to the bridge where they first kissed and contemplates ending her life.

In a similar vein, Down From Dover (1969) recounts the anguish of a young woman — rejected by her family because she has become pregnant out of wedlock — who gives birth to a stillborn baby girl.

Dying before she was born, the song says, was the child’s way of telling her mother that the absent father was not “comin’ down from Dover”.

The song, Parton recalled, was so controversial that many disc jockeys refused to play it.

One of many songs inspired by real life, Daddy Come and Get Me (1970), written with Parton’s aunt, Dorothy Jo Hope, was based, in part, on the story of a woman whose cheating husband, tired of her despair, had her committed to a mental institution.

“That’s just the way of the mountains,” Parton told the Times, reflecting on the bleakness in some of her music.

“You grow up singing those old sad songs. You don’t even think they’re sad.”

She continued: “I was born with a joyful heart, but I’m extremely sensitive. I hurt deep, and I’ve hurt a lot in my life. I feel deep for everything I see.”

With her 40-20-36 hourglass frame, her acrylic nails, her rhinestones and her wigs (“It’s human hair,” she said, “but not this human’s”), Parton was not a traditional avatar of the feminist cause.

She resisted overt identification with women’s liberation, once joking that if she had set fire to her bra it “would have burned for four days”. But in the final analysis, she agreed that she had lived the movement’s principles.

“I suppose I am a feminist if I believe that women should be able to do anything they want to,” Parton told Time magazine in 2020.

She went on: “I just really feel I can live my femininity and actually show that you can be a woman and you can still do whatever you want to do.”

Parton lifted up poor and working women in her music and in her films, especially “9 to 5,” whose anthem-like title song won Parton two Grammy Awards and an Oscar nomination for best original song. (Decades later, she was nominated for a Tony Award for the score of “9 to 5: The Musical.”)

Parton’s next Hollywood outing was as Mona Stangley in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, opposite Burt Reynolds as the local sheriff.

During the film’s production, Parton suffered from severe health problems, including endometriosis that required surgery and depression that she said led her to consider suicide.

Amid her struggles, Parton would lose herself in songwriting, a process that she likened to entering into a trance, during which she would pen as many as 20 songs in two or three days.

“I just kinda get into a place where nothing else exists,” she told The Post. “I try to relax and once it starts to come it stirs up my creative juices and then, of course, I’m in that place for as long as I want to write and then I don’t quit till I just about fall out. I don’t hardly eat anything. I don’t sleep. That’s called writing binges. That’s like my time with God.”

Parton was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1986.

Her other films from that era included Rhinestone (1984) with Sylvester Stallone — a flop — and Straight Talk (1992), a star vehicle featuring Parton as a call-in radio show host.

She recorded with Columbia Records and her own labels, Blue Eye and Dolly Records.

She collaborated with musicians including Kenny Rogers (they had a major hit with the duet Islands in the Stream) and won a Grammy in 1987 with Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstadt for the album Trio.

In her solo work, Parton increasingly explored bluegrass, the music of her youth, winning a 2000 Grammy for her album The Grass Is Blue. Another bluegrass collection, Little Sparrow, was nominated for a Grammy the following year.

She was nominated for a second Oscar for her song Travelin’ Thru, written for the 2005 film Transamerica, with Felicity Huffman as a trans woman seeking to form a relationship with her son (played by Kevin Zegers).

In the later years of her career, Parton won two Grammy Awards, in 2019 and 2020, for the contemporary Christian songs God Only Knows and There Was Jesus. Her first rock album, Rockstar, was released in 2023.

Ever the entrepreneur, Parton announced plans in 2021 to release a signature fragrance, called Scent From Above. Around that time, she told the Wall Street Journal that she wore makeup while sleeping on the chance that she would have to hurry out of bed because of a tornado.

She said she touched up her Maybelline and Max Factor over the course of the day — at least part of which she would spend, as ever, writing songs.

“This isn’t all I am,” she remarked to the Times years earlier about her appearance.

“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.”