Dolly Parton has died at 80, remembering the songs that touched millions

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Dolly Parton, the country music legend from the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee, has died at the age of 80. She passed away from cancer in Nashville on August 25, closing out a career that spanned seven decades. Parton will be remembered for songs that told beautiful stories with real honesty, the kind of songwriting that made her one of the most beloved figures in American music. Hard to think of another artist who managed to stay this universally loved for this long

The numbers behind her career are staggering, ten Grammy awards, more than 100 million records sold worldwide, and over 3000 songs written across her lifetime. Some of her biggest, Jolene, I Will Always Love You, Coat of Many Colors and 9 to 5, are the kind of songs almost everyone can sing along to regardless of whether they consider themselves a country fan. Parton always said songwriting was her way of expressing herself, calling it her therapy in interviews over the years. It is rare for a catalogue this large to also be this consistently good

She was born Dolly Rebecca Parton on January 19, 1946, the fourth of 12 children in a poor farming family living in a one room cabin in the Tennessee mountains. She started writing songs at just five years old, encouraged early on by an uncle who noticed something special in how she wrote and sang. By 13 she was already making her first appearance at the Grand Ole Opry, the spiritual home of country music in Nashville. That is a remarkable trajectory from a one room cabin to the biggest stage in country music before she had even finished school

Beyond the music, Parton was a sharp businesswoman who took firm control of a showbusiness career that lasted more than 60 years. In 1986 she opened Dollywood, a theme park built to celebrate the culture of the Smoky Mountains where she grew up. She also launched the Imagination Library, a program inspired by her own father who could not read or write, which mails free books to children every month. What started in Tennessee has since expanded to the UK, Ireland, Australia and Canada, sending out millions of books a year

Her philanthropic work went well beyond books too, with the Dollywood Foundation funding scholarships, hospitals and disaster relief for flood and wildfire victims over the years. In 2020, during the depths of the Covid pandemic, she donated a million dollars to Vanderbilt University Medical Centre, and the funding went toward research that helped support development of the Moderna vaccine. That is not a small gesture from someone who started out with nothing in a one room cabin. It says a lot about how she chose to use the wealth her music brought her

What stands out most to me is how she managed to stay beloved across just about every divide you can think of, generational, political, cultural, in a way almost nobody else in entertainment has ever pulled off. A lot of that comes down to how genuine she always seemed, whether she was joking about her own image or quietly funding a children's hospital without much fanfare. Curious what everyone's favorite Dolly song or memory is, feels like the right way to mark this one

Dolly Parton obituary: The country legend who sang from the heartwww.bbc.co.uk