Dorothy

Born in 1946 in rural Sevier County, Tennessee, Parton grew up in a large, poor family in the Smoky Mountains. She began singing in church as a child and started writing songs at a young age.

Parton, whose accolades included 11 Grammy awards, an Emmy, the Oscars’ Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, and recognition from sources as diverse as Ms. Magazine and the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, was born in 1946 in the small community of Pittman Center, Tennessee, near the Great Smoky Mountains. The family soon moved to a one-bedroom cabin in the nearby town of Locust Ridge, a dwelling that figures proudly in Parton’s rags-to-riches lore. She was one of 12 children; Parton’s father worked as a sharecropper and tobacco planter, and her mother entertained the large family with Appalachian stories and music.

Parton was born in poverty in a one-room cabin in Tennessee, the fourth child to a mother who would have 12 children by the age of 35, and a father who was a farmer and construction worker. One of her best-loved songs, Coat of Many Colours, was about her mother creating patchwork clothes; Parton’s first guitar was cobbled together from a mandolin with bass guitar strings. Her first proper guitar was given to her aged eight by her uncle, and she went from singing in church, to appearing on local television aged 10, to cutting her first record aged 13.

The Dollywood Foundation, funded through these business ventures and creative projects, was created in 1988, initially awarding college scholarships and running a scheme to help children complete high school in her native Sevier County, Tennessee. In 1995 Parton began her Imagination Library project, which sent an age-appropriate book to every child in the county every month until they were five. “My father could not read and write, and I saw how crippling that could be,” she explained. It expanded nationwide in 2000, internationally in 2006, and nearly 25m books are now distributed each year across the US, Canada, Australia, the UK and Ireland.

In lieu of flowers, the family asked that donations be made to Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, the literacy program she founded in 1995.

The 1990s saw a top-selling Christmas album and collaborations with other, oftentimes younger singers like Mary Chapin Carpenter and Billy Ray Cyrus. She contributed to the 1994 Red Hot + Country collection, part of an ongoing AIDS benefit campaign. In 1995 she created the Dolly Parton Imagination Library, in which any child under the age of 5 would be sent a free book each month, and involved herself in conservation efforts and has donated large sums of money to a hospital in the East Tennessee region. She has also been a vocal supporter of LGBT rights, and a $1 million donation she made to Vanderbilt University is said to have been key to the development of the Moderna COVID vaccine.

In the mid 1970s Parton broadened her sound, embracing pop-rock arrangements on songs such as 1977’s Light of a Clear Blue Morning – its accompanying album New Harvest … First Gathering was her first entry in the pop album chart. Later that year its follow-up Here You Come Again reached the Top 20 and was her first million-selling LP, powered in part by its hit title track, which also won Parton the first of her 10 Grammy awards.

In 1980 Parton co-starred in the feminist comedy 9 to 5 with Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda, and also recorded its theme song. A monumental success, the song remains so ingrained in American culture that many people still quote from it without even realizing it. The song won two Grammys in the country categories, but lost song of the year to “Bette Davis Eyes”—which is a good song, but come on.

A landmark Parton album came in 1987 with Trio, an exquisitely harmonised, springwater-clear collaboration with Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstadt, earning Parton her only nomination for album of the year at the Grammys. Another all-star trio recording came in 1993, with Tammy Wynette and Loretta Lynn on the album Honky-Tonk Angels, followed by a reunion with Harris and Ronstadt from Trio II in 1999, featuring a Grammy-winning cover of Neil Young’s After the Gold Rush.