Country music legend Dolly Parton has died aged 80

Article content

Parton said she was “serious-minded about my work, but I knew how to enjoy men. Being a girl always served me well.”

Article content

Kennedy Center Honors recipients, from left, Zubin Mehta, Steven Spielberg, Dolly Parton, Smokey Robinson and Andrew Lloyd Webber in Washington, DC, on Dec. 2, 2006. Photo by LESLIE E. KOSSOFF /AFP via Getty Images

Article content

Her pulchritude was unavoidable, but her songcraft was proof that Dolly was more than eye candy.

Article content

“She may lead with the boobs but she has the talent to back it all up,” Rolling Stone magazine editor David Wild once said.

Article content

Dolly Rebecca Parton was born on Jan. 19, 1946 in Sevierville, Tenn., the fourth of 12 children who grew up dirt poor in the family’s small shack in the Great Smoky Mountains.

Article content

The platinum blonde was a quick musical study. As a child, she sang her first songs to chickens outside the cabin. In 1959, she made her debut on the Grand Ole Opry’s stage at age 13.

Article content

She mastered the guitar but it was her soprano voice, with its cracked vibrato that fluttered through so many of her songs and would occasionally shrink to a wounded whisper, that critics hailed as a dose of mountain purity.

Article content

The day after graduating from high school, Parton struck out for the country music capital Nashville.

Article content

By 1967 at age 21, she was among the most recognized figures in American music, having joined Porter Wagoner’s syndicated country music television show that broadcast her voice and face into millions of U.S. homes.

Article content

Article content

Occasionally her songs were mawkish or unimaginative. But in 1971, she released the spare and gorgeous Coat of Many Colors, her archetypal, Bible-themed track about her mother overcoming poverty.

Article content

She eventually released 26 number one country hits, winning 10 Grammys and 13 Academy of Country Music awards.

Article content

But it was her ballad I Will Always Love You, the delicate homage she wrote for Wagoner during their 1973 professional split, that would grow into a global phenomenon. Houston recorded the song for the 1992 movie The Bodyguard, and it became one of the best-selling singles of all time.

Article content

Elvis Presley had wanted to record it as well, but The King required half the publishing rights to anything he recorded. Parton, who owned all her publishing rights, turned him down.

Article content

Parton opened her own theme park, Dollywood, in 1986 in Pigeon Forge, Tenn. It has grown into one of the most successful branding efforts in U.S. entertainment history, drawing millions of visitors per year.

Article content

Her work ethic was astonishing. Parton launched publishing and music production companies, a radio station and restaurants. She co-wrote a best-selling novel with author James Patterson. Her Instagram page, with 8.6 million followers, became an online phenomenon, and at age 75 she unveiled a new fragrance, Dolly.

Article content

Article content

In 2020, the ally to the marginalized gave $1 million to Vanderbilt University, which helped develop Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine. Her literacy program has donated some 100 million books to needy kids worldwide.

Article content

And her collaborations were relentless, including her work with actress Jennifer Aniston on the 2018 movie Dumpling, for which Parton wrote the soundtrack.

Article content

It was all stunning vindication for someone who was once introduced on television as “one of the prettiest, singin’est, songwritin’est little blondes in country music.”

Article content

Parton never had children, telling one interviewer she expected her songs “to support me when I’m old.”

Article content

She earned a Kennedy Center Honor in 2006, one of the nation’s highest accolades in the arts world. But in 2021, she revealed she had declined the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Donald Trump, saying she did not wish to travel to Washington during the coronavirus pandemic.

Article content

“It’d be nice but I’m not sure that I even deserve it,” she told NBC. “But it’s a nice compliment for people to think that I might deserve it.”

Article content

She was inducted to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in November 2022, despite initially turning it down.

Article content

Article content