Dolly Parton, who has died aged 80, arrived in Nashville to write songs rather than sing them. She left high school in 1964, moved to the city, and began as a songwriter. A year later a label signed her as an artist. Her team said she died at the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center after a short illness with cancer.
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The songs came first. From a catalogue of hundreds, she scored a record 25 US country number one singles, according to the Guardian.
Two classics in one sitting
Parton believed she wrote Jolene and I Will Always Love You in the same session, in 1973. The Guardian called them two of the 20th century’s greatest songs.
Jolene grew out of her marriage to Carl Dean, whom she met outside a laundromat on her first day in Nashville, aged 18. A red-headed bank clerk had flirted with him early in the marriage. Parton told the BBC’s The One Show in 2023 that she was simply jealous, and that it gave her a good idea for a song. It is now her most popular track, with more than 913 million streams on Spotify.
I Will Always Love You sounds like a love song. The BBC explains it was Parton asking her mentor, Porter Wagoner, to let her leave his TV show and go solo. It reached the top of the country chart in 1974. Parton was 21 when she joined Wagoner’s show, and in her book Star of the Show she wrote that he came to see her rise as a threat. She took the song back to number one in 1982 with a new recording.
The deal she turned down
Elvis Presley wanted to record I Will Always Love You. His manager, Colonel Tom Parker, asked for half the publishing rights, and Parton said no. That refusal paid off. Whitney Houston’s 1992 version for The Bodyguard is still the bestselling single by a woman, with an estimated 20 million sales.
Where 9 to 5 came from
The year 1980 was her peak. She had three country number ones in a row, among them 9 to 5. She wrote it for the film of that name, in which she starred with Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin, and it earned her an Oscar nomination for best original song. It also topped the US pop chart. In 2008 she went back to it, writing songs for a stage musical version.
The childhood behind the songs
Parton grew up poor in a one-room cabin in Tennessee, the fourth of 12 children. Her own favourite song, Coat of Many Colors, from 1971, tells how her mother stitched her a patchwork coat. Rolling Stone ranked it second among her 50 best songs.
Her first guitar was a mandolin fitted with bass strings. An uncle gave her a real one when she was eight. By 13 she had cut a record and played the Grand Ole Opry, where Johnny Cash introduced her.
What the money paid for
Parton founded the Imagination Library in 1995, inspired by her father, who could not read or write. The Guardian puts its total at more than 300 million books posted free to children.
In 2020 she gave $1 million to Vanderbilt University Medical Center for coronavirus research, and some of it supported work linked to the Moderna vaccine. Dollywood, her theme park in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, became a major employer in the region where she grew up.
She married Dean in 1966, and they stayed together until his death in 2025. Asked about her look, she had one line the Guardian calls her most quoted: “it takes a lot of money to look this cheap”.
