Dolly Parton
7.5
10 votes
Astrological Zodiac sign: Capricorn
Age: 67
Dolly Rebecca Parton is a Grammy Award-winning American singer-songwriter, author, actress and philanthropist, known for her prolific work in country music.
In the four-and-a-half decades since her national-chart début, she remains the most-successful female artist in the history of the genre, with 25 number-one singles (a record for a female artist), and a record 42 top-10 country albums. She has the distinction of having performed on a top-five country hit in each of the last five decades and is the only artist to score a number-one country single in each of the past four decades.
She is known for her distinctive Tennessee-mountain soprano, sometimes bawdy humor, flamboyant dress sense and voluptuous figure.
Dolly Parton was born in Sevierville, Tennessee, the fourth of twelve children born to Robert Lee Parton and Avie Lee Caroline Owens.
Parton has stated she is of Ulster Scots ancestry. She is distant cousins with adult-film actress Julia Parton.
Her family was, as she described them, "dirt poor". They lived in a rustic, dilapidated one-room cabin in Locust Ridge, Tennessee, a hamlet just north of the Greenbrier Valley in the Great Smoky Mountains of Sevier County, a predominently Pentecostalist area.
Music formed a major part of her early church experience. She once told an interviewer that her grandfather was a Pentecostal "holy-roller" preacher. Today, when appearing in live concerts, she frequently performs spiritual songs. (Parton, however, professes no religious denomination, claiming only to be "spiritual" while adding that she believes that all the Earth's people are God's children.)
Parton began performing as a child, singing on local radio and television programs in the East Tennessee area. By age nine, she was appearing on The Cas Walker Show on both WIVK Radio and WBIR-TV in Knoxville, Tennessee. At thirteen, she was recording on a small label, Goldband Records, and appearing at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, Tennessee. It was at the Opry where she first met Johnny Cash who encouraged her to go where her heart took her, and not to care what others thought. The day after she graduated from high school in 1964, Parton moved to Nashville taking many traditional elements of folklore and popular music from East Tennessee with her.
Parton's initial success came as a songwriter, writing hit songs for Hank Williams, Jr. and Skeeter Davis. She signed with Monument Records in late 1965, where she was initially pitched as a bubblegum pop singer, earning only one national-chart single, "Happy, Happy Birthday Baby," which did not crack the Billboard Hot 100.
The label agreed to have Parton sing country music after her composition, "Put It Off Until Tomorrow," as recorded by Bill Phillips (and with Parton, uncredited, on harmony), went to number six on the country-music charts in 1966. Her first country single, "Dumb Blonde" (one of the few songs during this era that she recorded but did not write), reached number twenty-four on the country-music charts in 1967, followed the same year with "Something Fishy," which went to number seventeen. The two songs anchored her first full-length album, Hello, I'm Dolly.
On May 30, 1966, she married Carl Thomas Dean in Ringgold, Georgia. She had met Dean at the Wishy-Washy Laundromat two years earlier on her first day in Nashville. His very first words to her were: "You're gonna get sunburnt out there, little lady."
Dean, who runs an asphalt-paving business in Nashville, has always shunned publicity and rarely accompanies her to any events. According to Parton, he has only ever seen her perform once. However, she has also commented in interviews that, although it appears they do not spend much time together, it is simply that nobody sees him. She has also commented on Dean's romantic side claiming that he will often do spontaneous things to surprise her, and sometimes even writes her poems.
The couple partly raised several of Parton's younger siblings at their home in Nashville, leading her nieces and nephews to refer to her as "Aunt Granny"; she has no children of her own.
See also: Singer, Actress, American, Grammy Award Winner, Grammy Award Nominee, Songwriter, Author, Philanthropist, Country Music
