Dorothy

After moving to Nashville, Parton notched her very first Top 40 hit with her song "Dumb Blonde" in 1967, according to the Country Music Hall of Fame.

In her middle age, during a perhaps less enlightened time in American society, Parton was often a punch line. Her voluptuous chest and many plastic surgeries were frequent fodder for jokes, and Parton perfected the trick of playing along with the gags while also subverting them. One of her earliest singles is titled “Dumb Blonde,” but it warns, “This dumb blonde ain’t nobody’s fool.” In a 2002 New York Times interview, she said, “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.”

With that in mind, listen anew to “Jolene.” It’s got all of Parton’s fabulous contradiction in it, the arch-femininity paired with command. What a mistake to take the song’s traditional “please don’t take my man” superficial pleading as weakness. Trumping the lyrics is Parton’s soaring voice and that galloping triplet rhythm. It might be her most deceptively powerful song.

Parton's legend was secured in 1973, when she released "Jolene," a song that transcended its moment by perfectly capturing the primal intensity of insecure romantic desire. With a melody redolent of a century of folk ballads and, as Parton told NPR in 2008, a chorus "even a first-grader or a baby could sing," this true-ish tale of rivalry among women is fluid enough that a man could take it on, as Jack White did in The White Stripes' 2001 version. "Jolene" is a murder ballad whose victims all survive, a cry of revenge in the face of betrayal that puts a woman in charge and unexpectedly creates a bond between two rivals.

On her marriage to Carl Dean Parton told Walters in a 1982 interview that her nearly 60-year marriage to Carl Dean, who died in 2025, gave her a "very special kind of sacred freedom."

Dolly Parton spent decades singing about love, heartbreak, faith and working "9 to 5," but there was one arena the country music legend repeatedly resisted entering: partisan politics.

"Dolly opened doors not just for me, but for her entire family to reach the potential we didn't even know was possible," he said. "Dolly also opened doors for generations of singers, songwriters, musicians, and dreamers from every walk of life and across every continent. By her example, we believed that anything was possible. She never saw a door she couldn't open, and the doors she opened made and changed history."

The over-the-top, rhinestoned style of the late Dolly Parton transformed the country music scene forever and has had much broader implications on American culture.

When Dolly’s identity didn’t match the plans pop culture had for her, she chose her roots, and was rewarded every time. Even her look was defiantly southern. A 1991 issue of Vanity Fair described Dolly as “every down-home virtue wrapped up in a sizzling blonde bombshell.” That’s the thing that drew me to Dolly all those years ago—she seemed to be the only woman in the South who could present as so sexy and be read as so wholesome. Most women who wore Daisy Dukes were whispered about in church pews and grocery lines, but Dolly wasn’t just loved in spite of it; she was lauded for it.

They may be scripted lines, but she was just as funny in real life: Dolly was strong and feminine in equal measure, confident and larger than life but never abrasive or mannish. She was spunky but always warm, fiercely independent but always making people feel needed. She shied away from letting people label her a feminist, once retorting indignantly that she loved men. Her career was nothing short of revolutionary, but she never acted like she had something to prove. She just loved being a woman, and her iconic wigs, makeup, and cup size were all part of the way she cheekily reminded the world of it. When a young fan asked if she ever wished she’d been born a man, she laughed and said if she had, she would have ended up a drag queen.

In a TIME magazine piece, Dolly detailed how she came to craft her look, never falling for the dated feminist tropes that high glamour, sparkle, and a big bouffant will make you the clown in a man’s world. Instead, she embraced her own caricature.

“I know whatever I say, people are going to listen, and they’re going to make more of it than maybe what I meant. So I have to be careful. Of course I have my opinion, but I’m not an opinionated person as a rule,” she told People in 2021.