Dorothy

Her death comes after Parton suddenly announced in May 2026 that she was canceling a Las Vegas show and said she'd been undergoing treatment for kidney stones for several years.

Parton’s death comes after a public struggle with her health. Fans were hit with a scare in September 2025 when she abruptly canceled a slated six-night Las Vegas residency at Caesars Palace. At the time, she cracked a classic Dolly joke to ease the blow, claiming it was just time for her “100,000-mile check-up” that didn’t involve her plastic surgeon. She asked for time to “get show ready,” reassuring the world that God hadn’t told her to quit the biz just yet.

Parton opened her own, still-expanding theme park — Dollywood — in the Smokies. And it wasn't like she faded into the background in actual Hollywood either. Not with the over-the-top, hyperfeminine look she'd cultivated for years: those piled-high blond wigs and stiletto heels and tight-fitting costumes she always said she had modeled after a woman from back home.

Earlier this month, Parton was scheduled to attend the Aug. 14 opening of a new ride at her Dollywood theme park but shared a recorded video instead.

Parton, who earned a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1984, made several more movies and performed around the world, but she always returned to the music that first made her famous — and to the hollers of East Tennessee where she was born and where she and her husband made their home.

In a music career that began when she was still a child, born into poverty in the tiny mountain community of Pittman Center, Tennessee, Parton went on to become one of the world's most successful and admired entertainers, regarded as a country music living legend. Her trademark style – big blonde hair, flamboyant clothes and makeup – was cultivated early in her career, while she was still in her teens.

1980 was a peak in her success, with three back-to-back country No 1s, including 9 to 5, taken from the film of the same name which Parton starred in alongside Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin, earning her an Oscar nomination for best original song. Parton would later write songs for a stage musical version of 9 to 5, in 2008.

Parton received a Lifetime Achievement Grammy in 2011, in addition to her 10 Grammy wins out of more than 50 nominations. Additionally, her songs "Jolene" and "I Will Always Love You" were inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. In 2024, Billboard magazine placed Parton in the No. 1 spot on their list of the "100 Greatest Country Artists of All Time."

During her more than 60-year career, Parton sold more than 100 million records and won 11 Grammy Awards, making her one of the bestselling musical performers of all time.

Dolly Parton was also generous with her money. Through her nonprofit Dollywood Foundation, "Saint Dolly," as her fans dubbed her, supported education by providing scholarships and financial assistance to people in need. Her Imagination Library, begun in 1995, has provided nearly 308 million books for free to children in the U.S., the U.K., Ireland, Canada and Australia, according to its official website.

Parton's philanthropic legacy also included the creation of the Imagination Library, which mails free books to children around the world. In the three decades since it was founded, the organization has mailed more than 300 million books to kids around the U.S., as well as Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland.

When wildfires in 2016 ravaged the Great Smoky Mountains in Eastern Tennessee, where she grew up, Parton created a fund that gave $1,000 a month for six months to some 900 families affected by the fires to help them get back on their feet, and also organized a telethon to raise money for the fires' victims. Four years later, Parton donated $1 million to Tennessee's Vanderbilt University Medical Center to help fund the search for a COVID-19 vaccine, and later urged Americans to get vaccinated against the virus in a video that showed her receiving the shot as she sang her hit "Jolene," with the refrain updated to "vaccine."

The day after she graduated from Sevier County High School in 1964, Parton headed to Nashville where she first made her mark writing songs for other performers, some of them with her uncle Bill Owens.

When veteran hitmaker Porter Wagoner asked Parton to join his TV show, she slipped into the role that was most readily available to women in Nashville: duet partner to a male star. But her wit and magnetism helped her transcend the limitations of being his girl singer, and eventually move on to focusing on her solo career in 1974.

By her 2014 Morning Edition interview, Parton was very practiced at explaining how she thought about it: "It's true I look totally artificial. But I like to think I'm totally real where it really counts. But my look came from a very sincere place. It's just a country girl's idea of glamour."