Boasting one of the most distinctive voices in music and a personality to match, Dolly Parton is by all measures one of the greats. She has 11 Grammys (plus a lifetime achievement award) and 26 songs that topped the Billboard country charts, and she’s sold more than 100 million records since her first album, Hello, I’m Dolly, was released in 1967.
Not only do you recognize the songs she writes and sings, like “I Will Always Love You” and “Jolene,” but you also know every lyric and can belt them out loud. In films like 1980’s female-empowerment comedy 9 to 5 and 1989’s tearjerker Steel Magnolias, she lights up the screen with her warm presence. And as a performer? Well, how many other senior citizens can gamely dress up like a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader and dazzle audiences during a live NFL halftime show? (That’s a rhetorical question.)
The mind-boggling thing is that even if Dolly Parton were famous only because of her artistic talents, she’d still be considered one of the greats. But Parton didn’t settle for great. Instead, with her plucky personality, unabashedly flashy image and generous spirit, the girl from rural Tennessee has become the definition of a national treasure. And she loves it.
“I’m very secure in who I am,” she told the Washington Post in 2006 before receiving her Kennedy Center Honors award. “I’ve always had a lot of confidence in my talent and in my personality. The way I am, the way I dress, the makeup, the hair. This is fun for me.” And for all her self-deprecating jokes about her, ahem, ample chest size, Parton has a genuinely big heart. A true philanthropist, she’s donated more than $100 million of her $500 million empire to various charities—and earned a prestigious 2025 Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for her admirable efforts.
Indeed, there’s always a good reason to honor Parton. But given that she turns 80 on Jan. 19, now is the perfect time to celebrate her. Here are 10 little-known (but incredible!) facts about this living legend.
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1. She grew up so poor that she had to a share a bed with her siblings
Her upbringing is the stuff of legend. Dolly Rebecca Parton was born on Jan. 19, 1946, the fourth of 12 children. Together, the bustling family resided in a two-room log cabin in rural Sevierville, Tennessee, with no electricity or running water. “In the winter time, we just had a pan of water and we’d wash down as far as possible, and we’d wash up as far as possible,” she told Playboy of her “dirt poor” childhood. “Then, when somebody cleared the room, we’d wash ‘possible.’ That’s the way it was.”
She and her brothers and sisters slept three or four to a bed in the cabin, and she’s admitted that her younger siblings often peed on her during the night. A replica of her childhood residence—which she sings about in 1973’s “My Tennessee Country Home”—can be found at Dollywood, the theme park she opened in 1986.
2. She met and fell in love with her husband at a laundromat …
Shortly after moving to Nashville in 1964 at age 18, Parton met Carl Thomas Dean when he pulled up in his white pickup truck outside the Wishy Washy Washateria. The pair started chatting, and she felt an instant connection with him. She recalled to Good Morning America in 2019, “This good-looking man just drives by, and he says something like, ‘Well, you’re going to get sunburn out here,’ and I say something stupid like, ‘Well, what’s it to you?'”
The two married in 1966 in a private ceremony in Georgia, and her wedding dress and his suit remain on display at the Chasing Rainbows Museum in Dollywood. And though Dean, who owned an asphalt paving company, lived famously on the DL and was rarely seen by her side in public, the two happily stayed together until his death in 2025, at age 82.
3. … but “I Will Always Love You” was not about Carl Dean
Written by Parton in 1973 and immortalized by Whitney Houston in 1992 for her movie The Bodyguard, “I Will Always Love You” remains one of the most iconic love songs of all time. But this was no romantic ballad. In truth, she penned it after she told her longtime mentor and TV duet partner, Porter Wagoner, that she wanted to go solo.
“How am I gonna make him understand how much I appreciate everything, but that I have to go?” she told the Tennessean in 2015. She decided to express her feelings via those heartfelt lyrics. Upon serenading it to him, “he started crying,” she added. “When I finished, he said, ‘Well, hell! If you feel that strong about it, just go on—providing I get to produce that record because that’s the best song you ever wrote.'”
4. Her role in 9 to 5 was written specifically for her
Parton was a bona fide country-music star when she was cast in the 1980 workplace comedy 9 to 5 as secretary Doralee Rhodes. It turned out that producer and co-star Jane Fonda had her eye on Dolly back when the film was just a mere idea. “She’s a great songwriter—and the songs have a kind of depth and humanity that made me feel that she could act,” Fonda explained to Today prior to the film’s release.
Though Parton was skeptical, Fonda sold her: “Jane said, ‘You just be yourself,'” she told Howard Stern in 2023. (Screenwriter Patricia Resnick told Rolling Stone in 2015 that Ann-Margret was the backup in case she passed.) Parton, of course, also wrote and sang the No. 1 theme song—she got inspired on the set after realizing that tapping on her acrylic fingernails sounded just like the keys of a typewriter.
5. She refuses to go on any of the Dollywood rides
Disneyland, Shmisneyland. In 1986, Parton opened her very own 160-acre theme park amid the Great Smoky Mountains in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. Dollywood now boasts more than 50 roller coasters, merry-go-rounds and water rides for all ages. (In 2019, she added Wildwood Grove, a six-acre $137 million expansion intended for families with younger children.) But Parton literally stays down to earth for a reason.
“I don’t ride the rides,” she told the New York Times. “I never have. I have a tendency to get motion sickness. Also, I’m a little bit chicken. With all my hair, I got so much to lose, like my wig or my shoes. I don’t like to get messed up.” Using her well-honed wit, she added, “I’m gonna have some handsome man mess it up—I don’t want some ride doing it.”
6. She arrived to the set of Steel Magnolias with trunks of wigs
Parton once told Vogue that she owns so many wigs that she “can’t really count” them all. So it’s no surprise that on the set of the female-bonding movie Steel Magnolias, it took some doing to get Parton camera-ready to play chatty beautician Truvy. “She moved in with multiple trunks of wigs, and she had her own makeup artist, who had a three-ring binder full of drawings of Dolly’s face,” Jacqueline Horton, her stand-in on the 1989 hit, told Garden & Gun in 2024. (Yet Horton noted that despite all the makeup and her heavy costumes, Parton never complained about the heat on the sweltering Louisiana set.)
Parton told Today that she felt a kinship to the character: “I think probably had I not been fortunate and made it in the business, I would have been a beautician—and been a good one.”
7. She doesn’t regret being child-free
Though Parton and Dean never became parents, she found a way to be connected to kids through her philanthropic work. And in 1995, she started the Imagination Library literacy program in honor of her father, Robert Lee Parton, who never learned to read or write. So far, the organization has given away more than 130 million free books to kids around the world. And with so much time spent helping others, Parton has long been at peace about her life decisions.
“I didn’t have children because I believed that God didn’t mean for me to have kids so everybody’s kids could be mine,” she told Oprah Winfrey in 2020. “I could do things like Imagination Library because if I hadn’t had the freedom to work, I wouldn’t have done all the things I’ve done.”
8. She’s actually hilarious when addressing her plastic surgery
Parton knows full well that her cartoon-like appearance—especially her bosom buddies—factors into her unique appeal. But unlike many celebrities, she’s open about her enhancements. “I do whatever I need to do,” she told Winfrey in 2003. “I’m like a show dog, and I have to keep myself up.” And her breasts? She joked, “I call these my weapons of mass distraction—they’re shock and awe!”
Parton even flexed them during an appearance on The Tonight Show in 2003, sharing that Arnold Schwarzenegger showed her how to do it. In a scientific nod to her oversized legacy, Dolly the sheep was named after her in 1996, after the animal was cloned via a cell removed from a ewe’s mammary gland. Said embryologist Ian Wilmut at the time, “We couldn’t think of a more impressive pair of glands than Dolly Parton’s.”
9. She donated $1 million to medical research during the pandemic
Besides her literacy program, Parton has generously supported and funded numerous charities and good causes over the decades. Her My People Fund gave $9 million to residents who lost their homes in fires in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, in 2016, and in a headline-generating gesture, she also donated $1 million in 2020 toward research that produced Moderna’s first COVID-19 vaccine.
Crediting Dr. Naji Abumrad, a physician and professor of surgery who treated Parton after her car crash in October 2013, Parton tweeted in 2021, “My longtime friend Dr. Naji Abumrad, who’s been involved in research at Vanderbilt for many years, informed me that they were making some exciting advancements towards research of the coronavirus for a cure.” She encouraged her fans to donate as well.
10. Her life motto comes from a lyric in one of her songs
Of all of Parton’s amazing statistics, perhaps the most impressive is that she’s written more than 3,000 songs over the course of her nearly 60-year career. (“I write a lot when I’m traveling on the bus,” she told Vogue in 2016). Her all-time favorite? The autobiographical “Coat of Many Colors” from 1971, which led to a 2015 TV movie of the same name that depicted her inspirational rags-to-riches life.
She added that the lyric “One is only poor only if they choose to be” derived from a philosophy that Parton’s mom, Avie Lee Owens, instilled in her and her siblings during their darkest moments. “We were poor,” she said. “But she’d say, ‘I don’t want to hear that. We are not poor just because we don’t have money. We’re rich in attitude, we’re rich in spirit, we’re rich in love.'”
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Sources:
- Washington Post: “Five for the Show”
- Rolling Stone: “Hear Dolly Parton Talk Toilets in 1978 Interview”
- People: “Dolly Parton Shares of Secrets of Marriage”
- Tennessean: “Dolly Parton Remembers Writing ‘I Will Always Love You'”
- Today: “9 to 5 Turns 35: See Dolly Parton, Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin discuss film in 1980”
- YouTube: “Dolly Parton on Filming ‘9 to 5’ and Writing the Theme Song on Her Fingernails”
- Garden & Gun: “Steel Magnolias Came Out 35 Years Ago. Dolly Parton’s Stand-In Reminisces”
- New York Times: “Dolly Parton on Dollywood”
- YouTube: “Dolly Flexing the Boobs on Leno 2003 October”
- ABC News: “Dolly Parton Says Not Having Kids Allowed Her to Prioritize Her Career”
- New York Times: “Ian Wilmut, Scientist Behind Dolly the Cloned Sheep, Is Dead at 79”
- USA Today: “Fact Check: Dolly Parton Helped Fund Moderna’s Covid-19 Vaccine Research”
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