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Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee received a $1m check from country music legend Dolly Parton in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic. It was one of many she’d given the center, but this time Dolly wanted her donation used to seek a cure for Covid 19. Vanderbilt hasn’t found a cure, unfortunately, but their research did help develop the Moderna vaccine earlier than expected. By early 2022, the jab had been given to more than 250m people and saved countless lives.
Dolly played down the importance of her donation in a BBC interview. Many other people, she said, probably donated too. Even so, she added: “I'm a very proud girl today to know I had anything at all to do with something that's going to help us through this crazy pandemic.”
It was a typically humble answer from a woman who would be forgiven for boasting from time to time. Dolly Parton is the most successful female country singer of all time. Her songs have been on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart for seven decades and she’s had more No. 1 hits than any other female artist in history. Dolly has also written more than 3,000 songs and won a staggering 10 Grammy Awards.
Her influence transcends country music. In 2021, she made Time magazine’s list of 100 Most Influential People under the heading ‘Icon’. “Have you ever met anyone who doesn’t love Dolly Parton?” wrote country star Miley Cyrus, her goddaughter.
Growing up in the Smoky Mountains
Dolly Rebecca Parton was born in 1946, the fourth of 12 children growing up in a one-room wooden cabin without heat or running water in Tennessee's Great Smoky Mountains. Her father, Robert Lee Parton, was an illiterate sharecropper. Her mother, Avie Lee, was a homemaker. Dolly spent her early childhood battling extreme poverty with the family living hand-to-mouth as subsistence farmers.
Dolly’s mother told her “you are only poor if you choose to be”, however, a line she used in her autobiographical Coat of Many Colors, one of a brace of songs about her childhood.
Her mother sang folk songs and there were musical instruments lying around at home so Dolly began writing music and singing. Her Uncle Bill decided that if Parton was serious about music, she’d need to learn guitar.
“He was like a kindred spirit. He saw that I had potential,” Dolly wrote in her 2020 book Songteller: My Life in Lyrics.
Like many in the rural South, Dolly started her music career in the church, but before long, she appeared on the local radio and began to record on a small label. Through recording and performances, she met other musicians who were further along in their careers.
The Great Johnny Cash
“I was about 13 when I first met Johnny Cash and that’s when Johnny was all strung out on drugs and everything, but he was so magnetic, so sexy. He was my first male grown-up crush, he just really moved me,” Dolly told The Big Issue in 2020.
Cash, who later became a great friend, encouraged her to make a career out of music. She did. She finished high school in 1964 and immediately moved to Nashville where she became a songwriter.
Soon afterward, she met her husband Carl outside the Wishy Washy Laundromat. She was 18. He was 21. They married in 1966 and are still together, although Carl shuns the spotlight.
Dolly’s recording career during the 1960s was slow to take off but in February 1971 she had her first No 1 hit, Joshua. Between 1971 and 1974 she released some of her most famous songs: Coat of Many Colors, My Tennessee Mountain Home, Jolene, and I Will Always Love You, to name a few.
By the end of the 70s, Dolly Parton was an established star with a string of hits. In 1980, she wrote and recorded the theme tune to the movie 9 to 5 in which she starred alongside Jane Fonda and Lillie Tomlinson.
Hits continued through the 80s, and, in truth, she’s never been far from the charts since 1971.
Her personal life wasn’t always so successful, however. According to Dolly on Dolly, a collection of the singer’s interviews, she considered taking her own life in the 1980s when she was struggling with her weight and emotional upheaval but was interrupted by her dog, Popeye: "I put the gun down. Then I prayed. I kinda believe Popeye was a spiritual messenger from God."
While she grew up in a big family, Dolly also knew heartbreak at a young age when she lost her brother, Larry, who died at four days old in 1955. She lost another brother, her songwriting partner Floyd Estel Parton, when he was 61. Brother Randy died of cancer in 2021.
Her mentor, Uncle Bill Owens, also died at age 85 in 2021. “I knew my heart would break when he passed, and it did,” Parton wrote in a eulogy.
Dolly the businesswoman
With Dolly’s great success, has come great wealth. Forbes estimates her back catalog is worth about $150m and brings in $6m to $8m a year.
"I look like a woman but I think like a man,” Dolly once said. “I've done business with men who think I'm as silly as I look. By the time they realize I'm not, I've got the money and gone."
She holds onto the rights to her songs. She refused to let Elvis record I Will Always Love You when Colonel Tom Parker demanded 50%, Elvis’ standard term. When Whitney Houston recorded it, “I made enough money to buy Graceland,” she told Forbes. She didn’t buy Graceland, investing instead in a black community project in Nashville.
In 1986, she started investing in amusem*nt parks, partnering with Herschend Family Entertainment to develop their Tennessee park into Dollywood.
As well as being a canny business deal, it was also a massive direct investment in her hometown. Dollywood is Tennessee’s most visited tourist attraction, bringing in 3m visitors a year, and her 50% stake is worth around $165, more than her back catalog.
Herschend employs 11,000 full-time, part-time, and seasonal workers - all of whom are now eligible for Dolly’s new education plan called ‘Grow U’. In 2022, the country singer’s company said it would pay for employees who want to pursue a college degree and cover 100% of their tuition, books, and other fees.
It’s not the first time she’s sponsored an educational program.
Books, not looks
In 1988, she set up the Dollywood Foundation, initially an education foundation to decrease the high school dropout rates in Tennessee. In 1995 the foundation set up Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, a book-gifting program that now distributes 1m books a month to children worldwide.
“When I was growing up in the hills of East Tennessee, I knew my dreams would come true,” she said on the library’s website. Dolly’s goal now is to inspire others to overcome their obstacles and give back the way she has.
“I know there are children in your community with their own dreams. They dream of becoming a doctor or an inventor or a minister. Who knows, maybe there is a little girl whose dream is to be a writer and singer,” she said. “The seeds of these dreams are often found in books and the seeds you help plant in your community can grow across the world.”
The library has directly benefited millions of children across the English-speaking world.
“If I’m remembered 100 years from now, I hope it will not be for looks but for books,” she once said.
Most likely, she’ll be remembered for books, looks, and a whole lot more.
