Nashville: Country music icon Dolly Parton passed away on Tuesday at the age of 80 after a brief but debilitating battle with cancer, her family announced. Her public relations team said that the legendary singer "departed her Earthly life today at the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center surrounded by loved ones."
Known for her flamboyant style, love for her adoring fans and a public persona that encompassed philanthropy, music, , stage and screen, Parton came to represent the heyday of pop culture Americana. A prolific songwriter she was particularly famous for her songs 'Jolene' and 'I will always love you', which she wrote on the same day. From a catalogue of hundreds of songs she had an eventual 25 US country No 1 singles and 47 albums in the country Top 10. She crossed over into the pop charts with ' 9 to 5' and a US No 1 hit in 1980. She also earned two Golden Globe nominations and donated more than 300m books to children through her Imagination Library literacy project. All of this while decked out in rhinestones, glitter, make up and big hair that sent crowds across the southern US wild.
Parton was born in poverty in a one-room cabin in Tennesee, tOne 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. That year, she appeared at the Grand Ole Opry, the concert hall in Nashville at the center of country music, and her performance was introduced by Johnny Cash. “I’ve always believed things would go well, and I dreamed that they would even before I was in high school,” she later said. “I always wanted to be a star. It just seemed natural to me.”
After graduating high school in 1964, she moved to Nashville and started out as a songwriter rather than performer. The following year, she was signed as an artist and initially moulded as a pop singer, without success; after she was allowed to switch to country, she scored back-to-back hits and released her debut album Hello, I’m Dolly. In 1966, she married Carl Dean – who died in 2025, with the couple renewing their vows in 2016 to mark 50 years together.
Beginning in 1967, a duet partnership with country singer and TV personality Porter Wagoner helped her star continue to ascend, and she had her first country No 1 in 1971 with the song Joshua.
Jolene, her unforgettably raw and desperate plea to a rival lover, was released in 1973 and became her first UK success, reaching No 7. I Will Always Love You, written to Wagoner as a farewell after their creative partnership ended, was a country No 1 in 1974 and again via a re-recorded version in 1982, and would go on to be a huge pop success when revived by Whitney Houston for the soundtrack of The Bodyguard in 1992: it is still the bestselling single of all time by a woman, with an estimated 20m sales.
