Dolly Rebecca Parton (born January 19, 1946) is an American singer-songwriter, musician, actress, philanthropist, and businesswoman, known primarily for her decades-long career in country music. After achieving success as a songwriter for others, Parton made her album debut in 1967 with Hello, I’m Dolly, which led to success during the remainder of the 1960s (both as a solo artist and with a series of duet albums with Porter Wagoner), before her sales and chart peak came during the 1970s and continued into the 1980s. Parton’s albums in the 1990s did not sell as well, but she achieved commercial success again in the new millennium and has released albums on various independent labels since 2000, including her own label, Dolly Records.

With a career spanning over fifty years, Parton has been described as a “country music legend” and has sold more than 100 million records worldwide, making her one of the best-selling female artists of all time. Parton’s music includes Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA)-certified gold, platinum and multi-platinum awards. She has had 25 singles reach no. 1 on the Billboard country music charts, a record for a female artist (tied with Reba McEntire). She has 44 career Top 10 country albums, a record for any artist, and she has 110 career-charted singles over the past 40 years. She has composed over 3,000 songs, including “I Will Always Love You” (a two-time U.S. country chart-topper, and an international pop hit for Whitney Houston), “Jolene”, “Coat of Many Colors”, and “9 to 5”. As an actress, she has starred in films including 9 to 5 (1980) and The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1982), for which she earned Golden Globe nominations for Best Actress, and Rhinestone (1984), Steel Magnolias (1989), Straight Talk (1992) and Joyful Noise (2012).

She has received 11 Grammy Awards out of 50 nominations, including the Lifetime Achievement Award; ten Country Music Association Awards, including Entertainer of the Year and is one of only seven female artists to win the Country Music Association’s Entertainer of the Year Award; five Academy of Country Music Awards, also including Entertainer of the Year; four People’s Choice Awards; and three American Music Awards. She is also in a select group to have received at least one nomination from the Academy Awards, Grammy Awards, Tony Awards, and Emmy Awards. In 1999, Parton was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. In 2005, she received the National Medal of Arts and in 2022, she was nominated for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, a nomination she had initially declined but ultimately accepted, and was subsequently inducted.

Outside of her work in the music industry, she also co-owns The Dollywood Company, which manages a number of entertainment venues including the Dollywood theme park, the Splash Country water park, and a number of dinner theatre venues such as The Dolly Parton Stampede and Pirates Voyage. She has founded a number of charitable and philanthropic organizations, chief among them is the Dollywood Foundation, which manages a number of projects to bring education and poverty relief to East Tennessee where she grew up.

Dolly Rebecca Parton was born January 19, 1946, in a one-room cabin on the banks of the Little Pigeon River in Pittman Center, Tennessee. She is the fourth of twelve children born to Avie Lee Caroline (née Owens; 1923–2003) and Robert Lee Parton Sr. (1921–2000). Parton’s middle name comes from her maternal great-great-grandmother Rebecca (Dunn) Whitted. Parton’s father, known as “Lee”, worked in the mountains of East Tennessee, first as a sharecropper and later tending his own small tobacco farm and acreage. He also worked construction jobs to supplement the farm’s small income. Despite her father’s illiteracy, Parton has often commented that he was one of the smartest people she had ever known in regards to business and making a profit.

Parton’s mother, Avie Lee, cared for their large family. Her 11 pregnancies (the tenth being twins) in 20 years made her a mother of 12 by age 35. Parton credits her musical abilities to her mother; often in poor health, she still managed to keep house and entertain her children with Smoky Mountain folklore and ancient ballads. Having Welsh ancestors, Avie Lee knew many old ballads that immigrants from the British Isles brought to southern Appalachia in the 18th and 19th century. Avie Lee’s father, Jake Owens, was a Pentecostal preacher, and Parton and her siblings all attended church regularly. Parton has long credited her father for her business savvy, and her mother’s family for her musical abilities. When Parton was a young girl, her family moved from the Pittman Center area to a farm up on nearby Locust Ridge. Most of her cherished memories of youth happened there. Today, a replica of the Locust Ridge cabin resides at Parton’s namesake theme park Dollywood.[9] The farm acreage and surrounding woodland inspired her to write the song “My Tennessee Mountain Home” in the 1970s. Years after the farm was sold, Parton bought it back in the late 1980s. Her brother Bobby helped with building restoration and new construction.

Parton has described her family as being “dirt poor”. Parton’s father paid missionary Dr. Robert F. Thomas with a sack of cornmeal for delivering her. Parton would write a song about Dr. Thomas when she was grown. She also outlined her family’s poverty in her early songs “Coat of Many Colors” and “In the Good Old Days (When Times Were Bad)”. For six or seven years, Parton and her family lived in their rustic, one-bedroom cabin on their small subsistence farm on Locust Ridge. This was a predominantly Pentecostal area located north of the Greenbrier Valley of the Great Smoky Mountains. Music played an important role in her early life. She was brought up in the Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee), in a congregation her grandfather, Jake Robert Owens, pastored. Her earliest public performances were in the church, beginning at age six. At seven, she started playing a homemade guitar. When she was eight, her uncle bought her first real guitar.