Dolly Parton Died
- Thread starter gohawks50
- Start date
I would have guessed her to be older
She was 80 but those tids were only 10.
2026 sucks. Never really liked her music but she was a national treasure. RIP in peace.
Losing Dolly instead of Trump. More proof that karma absolutely does not exist.
Worst. simulation. ever.
She was a treasure. Her music and her personality. Just a top quality human and artist. My wife was at a Brandi Carlisle concert last night, and they played "Coat of Many Colors." We were just listening to the "Trio" LP with Dolly, Emmylou, and Linda a few days ago. Congrats on a top tier life lived Dolly, I wish you had another 20 years . . .
Man, this one stings - she was probably the most beloved American of our time. 
if karma exists she'll get reincarnated to repeat life as a american treasure while trump in his next life perhaps will arrive in america in the back of a coyote smuggler van when vance is president
In a life described as taking her from “rags to rhinestones,” Dolly Parton and her blond bouffant — that mountain of hair even taller, it sometimes seemed, than the Tennessee foothills where she first strummed a guitar — carved out a singular place in American life.
Like almost everything about Dolly, as she was universally known, that place was big — big enough to contain her devotees in the country music world, the Appalachian poor who saw their lives reflected in the lyrics of her thousands of original songs, the working women she cheered on in the 1980 Hollywood comedy “9 to 5” and the children she reached through her Imagination Library literacy program. A centerpiece of her wide-ranging philanthropy, the initiative has provided more than 300 million free books to young readers around the world.
Ms. Parton, 80, died Tuesday in Nashville.
When she died, Ms. Parton was an international superstar and an unlikely feminist heroine, instantly recognizable for her profusion of sequins and the dramatic proportions of her bust, often accentuated by her skintight clothes. She took no offense, she said, when people made note of her figure. Dolly, the cloned sheep who made global headlines in the 1990s, was so named because her DNA came from a mammary cell.
“I don’t look real,” Ms. Parton conceded. But her taste for glitter and gilt “came from a very serious place,” she told The Washington Post — “just a poor country girl’s idea of glamour.”
Ms. Parton, a leading literacy advocate, and Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen (D) meet with children at a Nashville library in 2005. (John Russell/AP)
One of 12 children whose father supported them, in part, by selling moonshine, Ms. Parton was 5 or 6 years old when she wrote her first song. By the end of her career, she had written more than 3,000 — sometimes scribbling lyrics on dry cleaning receipts and other scraps of paper in her incessant creative drive — and sold more than 100 million records with hits such as “Jolene,” “My Tennessee Mountain Home,” “Coat of Many Colors” and “I Will Always Love You.”
She won 11 Grammy Awards, as well as one for lifetime achievement in 2011, was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1999, received a Living Legend medal from the Library of Congress in 2004 and was awarded the Kennedy Center Honors in 2006. In 2022, she was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
Ms. Parton parlayed her musical success into a movie career, starring with Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin in “9 to 5” as overworked office employees who seek vengeance — and fair pay — from their sexist boss. Ms. Parton later played a brothel owner in the musical comedy “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas” (1982) and a Southern beautician, a.k.a. “glamour technician,” in the three-hanky film “Steel Magnolias” (1989).
Ms. Parton, center, starred in the 1980 movie “9 to 5" with Jane Fonda, left, and Lily Tomlin. (Wally Fong/AP)
Ms. Parton performs at the House of Blues in California in 2002. (Robert Mora/Getty Images)
In a manner that evoked the entrepreneurial spirit of Walt Disney, Ms. Parton conjured a place where fans could escape into her world, opening the Dollywood theme park in 1986. Located in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, it became one of the most popular tourist destinations in the state and a boon to the beleaguered local economy. Dollywood drew millions of visitors with rides and attractions, including a replica of the two-room cabin where Ms. Parton grew up in a holler of the Great Smoky Mountains.
Along with her music royalties, proceeds from the theme park helped make Ms. Parton one of the richest self-made women in the United States, with a fortune estimated by Forbes magazine at $450 million.
Described at times as a “secular saint,” Ms. Parton engendered admiration verging on veneration with philanthropic efforts including the Imagination Library, a program launched in her native Sevier County, Tennessee, in 1995. She undertook the project, she said, to spare others the struggles that illiteracy visited upon her father.
In 2016, when wildfires ravaged her region of Tennessee, Ms. Parton announced that she would provide monthly stipends of $1,000 to families left homeless by the disaster. The initiative grew to support 900 families for six months, according to Blue Ridge Public Radio, and delivered a total of $12.5 million to the people of Sevier County.
Amid the coronavirus pandemic, Ms. Parton donated $1 million to Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, which helped develop the Moderna vaccine.
When she received the Moderna jab in March 2021, she did so on camera, telling viewers that, at 75, she was “old enough” and “smart enough” to get it. For the occasion, she penned and sang new lyrics to the tune of “Jolene”: “Vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, vaaa-cine. I’m begging of you, please don’t hesitate …”
In 2022, the parent company of Dollywood announced that it would pay for the tuition, fees and books for any employee who sought higher education. The same year, Ms. Parton received the Courage and Civility Award from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and his then-partner and now wife, Lauren Sánchez, a recognition that included $100 million for Ms. Parton to distribute to charity in whatever manner she chose. (Bezos is the owner of The Washington Post.)
From left, Reba McEntire, Carrie Underwood and Ms. Parton appear at the Country Music Association Awards in 2019. (Mark J. Terrill/AP)
Ms. Parton’s phenomenal popularity extended across the political spectrum and grew over the years to include feminists who once would have disdained Ms. Parton for her distinctly not women’s liberationist outward appearance. She was the rare celebrity treated as royalty both at the Grand Ole Opry and among drag queens, some of whom “look more like me than I do,” she joked.
Ms. Parton insisted that she didn’t “do politics,” telling Jad Abumrad, host of the 2019 podcast series “Dolly Parton’s America,” that “I have too many fans on both sides of the fence.” It sometimes seemed, Abumrad said in the podcast, that Ms. Parton offered Americans a rare point of consensus: Who doesn’t love Dolly?
The recognition, journalist Sarah Smarsh argued in her 2020 book, “She Come By It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs,” was in many ways long overdue.
“Many of her twenty-first-century fans are … ‘discovering’ what was there all along, in plain sight but for the blinders of patriarchy: Parton’s artistry, intellectual depth, and self-fashioned paradoxes that slyly comment on our country’s long-denied caste system (looking ‘cheap,’ say, while by all accounts acting with pure class).”
“Parton projected a sweetly defiant self-possession throughout her career in a man’s world,” Smarsh continued. “One doesn’t get the impression that she expected or cared whether such validation would come. But it’s a magnificent thing to witness — an atonement countless women have deserved but never received, flowering while the woman is alive to see it.”
Like almost everything about Dolly, as she was universally known, that place was big — big enough to contain her devotees in the country music world, the Appalachian poor who saw their lives reflected in the lyrics of her thousands of original songs, the working women she cheered on in the 1980 Hollywood comedy “9 to 5” and the children she reached through her Imagination Library literacy program. A centerpiece of her wide-ranging philanthropy, the initiative has provided more than 300 million free books to young readers around the world.
Ms. Parton, 80, died Tuesday in Nashville.
When she died, Ms. Parton was an international superstar and an unlikely feminist heroine, instantly recognizable for her profusion of sequins and the dramatic proportions of her bust, often accentuated by her skintight clothes. She took no offense, she said, when people made note of her figure. Dolly, the cloned sheep who made global headlines in the 1990s, was so named because her DNA came from a mammary cell.
“I don’t look real,” Ms. Parton conceded. But her taste for glitter and gilt “came from a very serious place,” she told The Washington Post — “just a poor country girl’s idea of glamour.”
Ms. Parton, a leading literacy advocate, and Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen (D) meet with children at a Nashville library in 2005. (John Russell/AP)
One of 12 children whose father supported them, in part, by selling moonshine, Ms. Parton was 5 or 6 years old when she wrote her first song. By the end of her career, she had written more than 3,000 — sometimes scribbling lyrics on dry cleaning receipts and other scraps of paper in her incessant creative drive — and sold more than 100 million records with hits such as “Jolene,” “My Tennessee Mountain Home,” “Coat of Many Colors” and “I Will Always Love You.”
She won 11 Grammy Awards, as well as one for lifetime achievement in 2011, was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1999, received a Living Legend medal from the Library of Congress in 2004 and was awarded the Kennedy Center Honors in 2006. In 2022, she was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
Ms. Parton parlayed her musical success into a movie career, starring with Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin in “9 to 5” as overworked office employees who seek vengeance — and fair pay — from their sexist boss. Ms. Parton later played a brothel owner in the musical comedy “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas” (1982) and a Southern beautician, a.k.a. “glamour technician,” in the three-hanky film “Steel Magnolias” (1989).
Ms. Parton, center, starred in the 1980 movie “9 to 5" with Jane Fonda, left, and Lily Tomlin. (Wally Fong/AP)
Ms. Parton performs at the House of Blues in California in 2002. (Robert Mora/Getty Images)
In a manner that evoked the entrepreneurial spirit of Walt Disney, Ms. Parton conjured a place where fans could escape into her world, opening the Dollywood theme park in 1986. Located in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, it became one of the most popular tourist destinations in the state and a boon to the beleaguered local economy. Dollywood drew millions of visitors with rides and attractions, including a replica of the two-room cabin where Ms. Parton grew up in a holler of the Great Smoky Mountains.
Along with her music royalties, proceeds from the theme park helped make Ms. Parton one of the richest self-made women in the United States, with a fortune estimated by Forbes magazine at $450 million.
Described at times as a “secular saint,” Ms. Parton engendered admiration verging on veneration with philanthropic efforts including the Imagination Library, a program launched in her native Sevier County, Tennessee, in 1995. She undertook the project, she said, to spare others the struggles that illiteracy visited upon her father.
In 2016, when wildfires ravaged her region of Tennessee, Ms. Parton announced that she would provide monthly stipends of $1,000 to families left homeless by the disaster. The initiative grew to support 900 families for six months, according to Blue Ridge Public Radio, and delivered a total of $12.5 million to the people of Sevier County.
Amid the coronavirus pandemic, Ms. Parton donated $1 million to Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, which helped develop the Moderna vaccine.
When she received the Moderna jab in March 2021, she did so on camera, telling viewers that, at 75, she was “old enough” and “smart enough” to get it. For the occasion, she penned and sang new lyrics to the tune of “Jolene”: “Vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, vaaa-cine. I’m begging of you, please don’t hesitate …”
In 2022, the parent company of Dollywood announced that it would pay for the tuition, fees and books for any employee who sought higher education. The same year, Ms. Parton received the Courage and Civility Award from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and his then-partner and now wife, Lauren Sánchez, a recognition that included $100 million for Ms. Parton to distribute to charity in whatever manner she chose. (Bezos is the owner of The Washington Post.)
From left, Reba McEntire, Carrie Underwood and Ms. Parton appear at the Country Music Association Awards in 2019. (Mark J. Terrill/AP)
Ms. Parton’s phenomenal popularity extended across the political spectrum and grew over the years to include feminists who once would have disdained Ms. Parton for her distinctly not women’s liberationist outward appearance. She was the rare celebrity treated as royalty both at the Grand Ole Opry and among drag queens, some of whom “look more like me than I do,” she joked.
Ms. Parton insisted that she didn’t “do politics,” telling Jad Abumrad, host of the 2019 podcast series “Dolly Parton’s America,” that “I have too many fans on both sides of the fence.” It sometimes seemed, Abumrad said in the podcast, that Ms. Parton offered Americans a rare point of consensus: Who doesn’t love Dolly?
The recognition, journalist Sarah Smarsh argued in her 2020 book, “She Come By It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs,” was in many ways long overdue.
“Many of her twenty-first-century fans are … ‘discovering’ what was there all along, in plain sight but for the blinders of patriarchy: Parton’s artistry, intellectual depth, and self-fashioned paradoxes that slyly comment on our country’s long-denied caste system (looking ‘cheap,’ say, while by all accounts acting with pure class).”
“Parton projected a sweetly defiant self-possession throughout her career in a man’s world,” Smarsh continued. “One doesn’t get the impression that she expected or cared whether such validation would come. But it’s a magnificent thing to witness — an atonement countless women have deserved but never received, flowering while the woman is alive to see it.”
I think there were a couple that I actually liked, but that was well overshadowed by her philanthropic efforts and just being a nice person. Really was national effing treasure. I was reading something the other day about one of her programs. Incentivized an entire county's children and decreased the dropout rate from 35 percent to just 6 percent. !! This is a style of program the schools/govt should review. Cheaper to educate than incarcerate.
A Timeline of Dolly Parton’s Good Deeds
Dolly Parton is not only talented, but she's also charitable.
www.billboard.com
Damn heart of gold.... Def lost a good one there.
not at all, in fact I would say she dispised politican's
Really big loss of a first class human being.
There are a few of her own songs that I like - I think her version of Rocky Top is probably as fun as any - but where I've really gained an appreciation for her musically is hearing her do backup harmonies on bluegrass and bluegrass-adjacent tracks with other artists. Actually pretty amazing for someone of her talent and reputation to take a back seat to the lead, not steal the show, and bring a sincerity that genuinely improves the overall musical output.
There are a few of her own songs that I like - I think her version of Rocky Top is probably as fun as any - but where I've really gained an appreciation for her musically is hearing her do backup harmonies on bluegrass and bluegrass-adjacent tracks with other artists. Actually pretty amazing for someone of her talent and reputation to take a back seat to the lead, not steal the show, and bring a sincerity that genuinely improves the overall musical output.
This is sad news. Definitely one of the good ones. Give you her shirt right off her back which I would of course accept. Get a new shirt and get to see those tig ol bitties. The world is a worse place without her.
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I think losing her husband Carl last year had a lot to do with it.
The responsibility of National Treasure now falls solely on Jameis.
The responsibility of National Treasure now falls solely on Jameis.
One big time celebrity I don't believe I've ever heard a bad thing about.
This. RIP Dolly. Thank you for showing us how people with wealth can act if they choose to.
Norm MacDonald and Dolly Parton are the only two celebrity deaths where I felt genuine sadness. RIP.
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