Dolly Parton

Dolly Parton is renowned worldwide as a country singer, chart-topping songwriter, businesswoman, actress, and comedian. She was born on January 19, 1946, in Pittman Center, Tennessee, and raised in the Smoky Mountains of East Tennessee. Parton moved to Nashville after high school and initially worked as a songwriter for artists like Skeeter Davis. She then joined Porter Wagoner on his weekly TV show, and the singers' seven-year collaboration transformed her into a major star. When she left the show in 1974, she wrote one of her most famous songs, the Number One hit "I Will Always Love You," as a parting gift to Wagoner. The 1977 album Here You Come Again signaled her move into pop, where her humor and exaggerated blonde image seduced mainstream audiences. The record's title track won her a Grammy Award for Best Female Country Vocal Performance, and Dolly Parton went on to gain film roles for her developing acting career. The movie 9 to 5 was released in 1980, with the accompanying soundtrack song of the same title giving her a Number One hit on Billboard's country, pop, and adult contemporary charts, making her one of the only female artists to ever achieve a triple Number One. More hits followed in the form of 1983's "Islands in the Stream" with Kenny Rogers, 1984's "Tennessee Homesick Blues," and 1985's "Think About Love." She then joined up with Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstadt in 1987 to release Trio, a collaborative album that won a Grammy for "Best Country Performance By a Duo or Group." She transitioned into bluegrass for The Grass Is Blue (1999), Little Sparrow (2001), Halos & Horns (2002), and Those Were the Days (2005), and remained active on the road and in the recording studio into the 2020s, with albums like 2016's Pure & Simple and 2020's A Holly Dolly Christmas both topping the Top Country Albums Chart. Her forty-eighth solo album, Run, Rose, Run, followed in 2022, debuting at Number 1 on the the UK's Country Albums chart.

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