Dolly Parton, the country music star, has died at the age of 80
Dolly Parton, a fixture in public life for decades through her music, acting and philanthropy, had suffered a recent spell of bad health that forced her to cancel appearances and concerts.
Her death was confirmed by her nephew on Tuesday.
In an interview with People magazine last week, Parton said she had recently been through some “hard times with my health.”
“I am dealing with some health issues that I just didn’t pay attention to when I was watching over [her late husband] Carl,” she said, adding: “Even though I’m still healin’, I’m still workin’.”
The singer rose to fame singing ballads about her life growing up in Appalachia in the rural US.
One of 12 children born in Locust Ridge, Tennessee, Parton, who was taught to sing by her mother, would find herself on country music’s biggest stage aged just 13 when she performed at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville.
Although she moved to Nashville after leaving secondary school, her poor upbringing and experiences of rural Appalachia would later reappear in her music.
In “Coat of Many Colours”, she would recall being sent off to school with “patches on my britches” and “holes in both my shoes”, where fellow students mocked the patchwork coat her mother made out of a “box of rags”.
On her first day in Nashville, she met Carl Dean, a contractor, who later became her husband of almost 60 years. He died in May, aged 82.
Parton had her first solo number one with “Joshua” in 1971, based on the “mountain men” she knew growing up in Appalachia.
This was followed by a string of more number ones three years later, with “Jolene”, “I Will Always Love You” and “Love is Like a Butterfly”.
At that point one of the biggest country stars in the world, she began experimenting with different musical genres, attempting a country to pop crossover with “Here You Come Again” later that decade.
More than four decades later, she would release her first rock album, “rocks-tar”, which became her most successful debut album in sales.
Over the course of her career, she would produce top 10 albums in seven different decades, and collect a host of awards including 10 Grammys and several country music awards. She was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1999.
But Parton became known not just for her music but also for the distinct image she cultivated since she began her music career.
She became inseparable from the voluminous blonde wigs she wore for performances. Balanced on top of the five-foot singer, her husband would joke that she looked like a cotton bud.
Parton owned hundreds of wigs and told interviewers she wore a different one every day.
“I have a big hair day, but not a bad hair day,” she once explained, having tried to give her hair the same voluminous quality early in her career without success.
Another part of her ensemble was the flamboyant western-inspired outfits that almost invariably featured high heels, bright colours, shoulder pads with garments accentuating her tiny waist. Many of them were heavy on the leather and rhinestones.
Parton would often employ self-deprecating humour in public, and laughed off suggestions posed by an interviewer that she was a “fashion icon”.
At another point she claimed, tongue-in-cheek: “It takes a lot of money to look this cheap.”
Alongside her musical career she took up acting, with notable success compared to some of her fellow musicians. Highlights included “9 to 5”, for which she also provided the theme song, and “Steel Magnolias”.
Parton opened the Dollywood theme park in 1985, which has become one of the major tourist attractions in the South, and her non-profit Dollywood Foundation three years later.
Her Imagination Library, which provides one free book a month to children, has distributed more than 178 million books around the world.
The Library of Congress presented Parton with the Living Legend Award in 2004, while the following year she received the National Medal of Arts, the highest award given to artists by the US government.
That was followed, a year later, with the Kennedy Center Honours at a ceremony in Washington, DC.
Sister ‘up all night praying’
In October 2025, her younger sister Freida prompted concern when she said she had been “up all night praying” for Parton.
A month before, Parton cancelled an appearance at her Dollywood theme park to treat an infection caused by a kidney stone.
She had also postponed her Las Vegas residency over “health challenges” that she said would require “a few procedures”, admitting: “It’s not the usual trip to see my plastic surgeon.”
Following speculation about her health, Parton declared in a video posted on social media: “I ain’t dead yet.”
However, she admitted she had been suffering from health problems because she had not taken care of herself in the months following her husband’s death.
It was “nothing major”, she said, but “I did have to cancel some things so I could be closer to home.”
Credit: The Telegraph
