Dolly Parton

The songwriter from Locust Ridge who wrote more than three thousand songs and kept nearly all of them. Dolly Parton was born in a one-room cabin in Sevier County, Tennessee in 1946, the fourth of twelve children, and left for Nashville the day after she finished high school in 1964. Porter Wagoner put her on his television show in 1967 and she spent seven years there before writing I Will Always Love You to get out. She has more No.1 hits on the Billboard country chart than any other woman — twenty-five — and released over two hundred singles across eight decades, from Coat of Many Colors and Jolene through the bluegrass records she made in her fifties to a rock album at seventy-seven.

The business decisions were as consequential as the songs. She refused Colonel Tom Parker's demand for half the publishing on I Will Always Love You and kept every cent when Whitney Houston's version became the best-selling single ever released by a woman. She built Dollywood in the county she grew up poor in, and the Imagination Library she founded has mailed books to millions of children. She married Carl Dean in 1966 and stayed married to him for fifty-nine years, until his death in March 2025. She died at her home in Nashville on August 25, 2026, at eighty. She was funny about almost everything and serious about the work.