Country music star Dolly Parton has died

Dolly Parton, the country music icon whose soaring vibrato vocals, poignant songwriting and sparkling costumes defined her rise from a log cabin in the Tennessee mountains to the height of stardom and acclaim, has died. She was 80 years old.

Parton died peacefully Tuesday in Nashville, Tennessee, her publicist said in a statement.

Known for her curvy physique, massive blonde wigs and skin-tight outfits that served her self-deprecating wit, she was among the most beloved personalities in music and beyond — the rare celebrity whose appeal transcended generations, geography and politics.

She wrote hundreds of songs, including classics like “Jolene,” “Coat of Many Colors” and “I Will Always Love You,” that totaled more than 100 million worldwide sales and more than 1 billion online streams. Parton, who plucked bejeweled banjos, guitar and dulcimers with her long fingernails during performances, was a generous philanthropist and successful businesswoman whose projects included a theme park in the Smoky Mountain foothills near her birthplace.

Her career was forever influenced by her upbringing as one of 12 children born into what she called a “dirt poor” Tennessee family. She started her education nonprofit, Imagination Library, to send free books to children in Tennessee because her father, who quit school to work on the farm, struggled to learn to read.

Parton’s first musical performances were in church, where her grandfather was a preacher. By age 10, she was learning guitar and singing on local television shows. At 13, she appeared on the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, where Johnny Cash introduced her as “a little girl here from up in East Tennessee.”

With a suitcase of songs, she followed her uncle, Bill Owens, also a songwriter, to Nashville after graduating high school in 1964. Fred Foster, who produced Roy Orbison, Willie Nelson and more, saw her potential and got her songs cut by other artists, as well as recording and releasing Parton singing her own material. By the mid-1970s, Parton was a Nashville queen.

A key collaboration with Porter Wagoner

Parton’s partnership with Porter Wagoner, a pencil-thin pompadoured star with flashy rhinestone outfits, was key to her career. She honed her acting skills on his syndicated TV show and he advocated for her to get a record deal at RCA. Their first duet, “The Last Thing On My Mind,” was released in 1967, the same year she started her own publishing company.

While their duets were often big radio hits, Parton’s solo singles didn’t chart as high at first. With Wagoner as a co-producer, she began to adjust her country warble to a more polished, pop-leaning style.

She got her first No. 1 solo single with “Joshua,” and reached the Top 5 with the ballad “Coat of Many Colors,” about how her mother sewed together scraps of clothes to make a coat Parton wore “so proudly” even as her peers mocked her for being poor. The song, with its Biblical references and ode to maternal love, was later made into a children’s book and a TV movie.

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