NASHVILLE, TN - Dolly Rebecca Parton, the rhinestone-and-rags daughter of the Great Smoky Mountains who wrote “Jolene” and “I Will Always Love You” on the same day and then spent six decades making the whole country feel like kin, died Tuesday, August 25, 2026, at Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center in Nashville. She was 80. Her nephew Bryan Seaver told the world in a video she had asked him, years ago, to deliver when the time came. Publicist Marcel Pariseau said she died after a brief battle with cancer, surrounded by loved ones. A few days earlier she told People magazine she was dealing with health she had let slide while watching over her husband, Carl Dean, who died in March 2025. Last fall the rumors got loud enough that she got on social media and said it the only way Dolly would: “I ain’t dead yet.”
She was born January 19, 1946, in a one-room cabin in Pittman Center, Tennessee, the fourth of twelve, a farmer’s daughter who wrote her first song at about six for a corncob doll with corn-silk hair. Her mother sewed a coat of scraps. Dolly turned that into a song the world still sings. An uncle put a guitar in her hands at eight. She was on local television at ten, and at the Grand Ole Opry at thirteen with Johnny Cash introducing her. After high school in 1964 she went to Nashville, married Carl Dean in 1966, and by 1967 she was on Porter Wagoner’s television show. When that partnership ended she wrote him a goodbye, “I Will Always Love You,” a country No. 1 in 1974, then Whitney Houston’s twenty-million-selling anthem in 1992. “Jolene” was the other song from that same day, a plea so raw it never wore out. She always called Sevierville home. In 1987 her hometown set a bronze of her on the Sevier County Courthouse lawn, a young Dolly sitting on a rock with a guitar, barefoot, the kind of thank-you she said made her daddy proud.
By 1980 she had crossed over without leaving home. “9 to 5” topped the pop chart and she stood in the movie next to Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin, earning an Oscar nomination for the song. There was “Islands in the Stream” with Kenny Rogers, Steel Magnolias, Trio with Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstadt, and a late stretch of bluegrass records. In 2023 she put out Rockstar, her first rock album, singing with Paul McCartney, Elton John, Sting, Stevie Nicks and a long list of friends. It went to No. 3 on the Billboard chart, the highest of her career, a late-in-life reminder that she could still surprise people and still sound like herself. She took a stake in a Tennessee park and called it Dollywood. She was funny about the hair and the rhinestones (“it takes a lot of money to look this cheap”) and dead serious about the work. More than 100 million records sold. Ten Grammys. A Kennedy Center Honor. The kind of star who could sit with anyone and never talk down to a soul.
The part she talked about most was the books. Imagination Library, started in Sevier County because her father could not read, now sends tens of millions of books a year to children with their names on the mail. In 2020 she put a million dollars toward COVID-19 research that helped produce the Moderna vaccine, then rolled up a sleeve and took the shot. Jeff Bezos later gave the foundation $100 million. She is survived by six of her siblings. A Broadway musical of her life is still set to open. The family asked that she be remembered the way she wanted to be laid to rest: after a lifetime in heavy rhinestones, in a beautiful bed of plush cotton.
Sources: The Guardian · Associated Press · Reuters · The New York Times