Dolly Parton, who rose from a loving if impoverished upbringing in the mountains of East Tennessee to become the “Queen of Country” music, a Hollywood star and a beloved American icon, has died, her family announced on Tuesday.
Parton was 80. Parton’s nephew, Brian Seaver, announced the news in a video posted on her Instagram.
“My name is Brin Seaver, son of Cassie Parton, and I’m representing the Parton and Owens family today announcing the passing of my aunt, Dolly Rebecca Parton Dean, Sister, Sis and Granny to one generation and Gigi to the next,” Seaver said in a video.
“This video announcement is something Dolly asked of me years ago, before I fully absorbed it as a future reality. As her head of security for more than two decades, a role my father Larry held before me, I have imagined the heaviness of this moment but haven’t truly felt it til now,” he added.
Her death came after Parton suddenly announced in May 2026 that she was canceling a Las Vegas show and said she’d been undergoing treatment for kidney stones for several years.
“Lord, they dig more stones out of me a year than the rock quarry in Rockwood, Tennessee,” Parton said in a statement. “But seriously, my immune system and my digestive system got all out of whack over the past couple three years, and they’re working real hard on rebuilding and strengthening those and hopefully I’ll be up to snuff again soon.”
During her more than 60-year career, Parton sold more than 100 million records and won 11 Grammy Awards, making her one of the best-selling musical performers of all time.
Parton also became a star on the silver screen, gaining a whole new audience and critical acclaim when she brought her Southern charm to movies like “9 to 5” (she wrote and sang the theme song), “Steel Magnolias” and “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.”
Bedecked in blonde bouffant hairdos and never without her makeup, Parton also became one of the nation’s best known brands who parried questions about her hourglass figure and augmented breasts with her signature self-deprecating wit.
“It costs a lot of money to look this cheap,” Parton once said.
Parton was also a shrewd businesswoman who amassed an estimated $650 million fortune and maintained creative control in the cutthroat and male-dominated music industry. She presided over an entertainment empire that included the Dollywood theme park. And she was a devoted philanthropist who launched the Dollywood Foundation to provide poverty relief and fund educational programs in her native East Tennessee.
Never shy at expressing her Christian faith, Parton was also a public supporter of the LGBTQ community who advocated for marriage equality and spoke up in defense of transgender people.
“I keep saying: If you’re the fine Christian that you think you are, why are you judging people,” Parton said during a 2017 interview with Larry King. “That’s God’s job.”
Along those lines, she jokingly told a British outlet a few years earlier: “I think gay couples should be allowed to marry. They should suffer just like us heterosexuals.”
Through it all, Parton leaned on the love of her life, her husband Carl Thomas Dean, who died in March 2025 at age 82 and who, from the moment they married in 1966, happily ceded the spotlight to his world-famous wife.
“Words can’t do justice to the love we shared for over 60 years,” Parton said in July 2025.
Born January 19, 1946, in a one-room cabin on the banks of the Little Pigeon River near the town of Sevierville, Parton was the fourth of 12 children.
Her father, Robert Lee Parton, could not read or write and often supplemented the family’s meager income from their farm by working constructions jobs.
Her mother, Avie Lee Parton, ran the household and was fond of singing traditional Appalachian ballads. The future superstar said it was her mother who instilled in her a love for music.
At age 6, Parton wrote her first song titled “Little Tiny Tassel Top.”
And it was at church that Parton first started performing. By age 13, Parton was singing on local radio and television shows and made her debut at the Grand Ole Opry, where she met Johnny Cash.
“Dolly Parton has one of the most distinctive voices in American pop music,” Katherine Dacey, a professor at the Berklee College of Music, told NBC News before Parton’s death was announced. “Her high soprano voice gets its distinctive character from her fast vibrato and vocal twang.”
The day after she graduated from Sevier County High School in 1964, Parton headed to Nashville where she first made her mark writing songs for other performers, some of them with her uncle Bill Owens.
In songs like “Tennessee Homesick Blues” and “Coat of Many Colors,” Parton drew inspiration from her hardscrabble childhood.
Three years after leaving school, Parton released her first record, “Hello, I’m Dolly” and caught the attention of country star Porter Wagoner and became a regular on his shows.
Then, in 1974, Parton broke out on her own when she topped the country charts for the first time with a song she wrote and performed called “Jolene.” She later revealed it was inspired by a bank teller who flirted with her husband when they were newlyweds.
Her next four singles were also country chart toppers and one of them, “I Will Always Love You,” later became a huge hit for Whitney Houston in 1992.
In 1977, Parton released her first self-produced album “New Harvest…First Harvest” and became the first female country artist to have an album sell over a million copies.
Parton also won her first Grammy with a single from that record called “Here You Come Again.”
Dolly Parton, country music icon, dies at 80 WHEC.com.
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