The world is mourning the loss on Tuesday of “the rhinestone-studded, rags-to-riches daughter of Appalachia who for six decades ruled country music — and much of pop culture — with an outsize personality and down-home wit that enshrined her as one of America’s most cherished originals,” says The New York Times.
The songwriter, singer, actress, entrepreneur and philanthropist died at age 80 after a brief battle with cancer, according to a family spokesman.
Dolly published 3,000 of her songs. Her music “ran the gamut: mountain bluegrass and soul-inflected countrypolitan, disco-era pop and covers of classic rock touchstones written by Neil Young and Led Zeppelin — all of it rendered indelible by her irrepressible spirit and alternately keening and gossamer soprano drawl,” says the Times.
Dolly was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1999 and the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2001, was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 2005 and was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2022.
But perhaps even more remarkable than the accolades and awards was Dolly’s “unstinting generosity of spirit — her commitment, born of deep religious convictions and an immense heart, to seeing the humanity in all people,” says the Times.
Her tenant farmer father’s illiteracy inspired Dolly to establish the Imagination Library, which as of today has distributed more than 332 million books to babies and young children.
She gave generously to Sevier County, her home in Tennessee. In the early 1990s, she started offering $500 to local high school graduates, to help reduce the dropout rate, and in 2000 added five $15,000 college scholarships. In 2007, she held a benefit concert to raise money for a new hospital.
In 2016, Dolly organized a telethon, “Smoky Mountains Rise,” which raised more than $9 million after wildfires in eastern Tennessee, and she funded grants for families whose homes had been destroyed. In 2024, after Hurricane Helene, she, her foundation and her businesses gave $2 million to relief efforts.
She also donated $1 million in 2017 to the Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, in honor of a niece who’d been treated for leukemia there. She gave another $1 million to Vanderbilt in 2020 to help fund the development of the Moderna Covid-19 vaccine, and $1 million more for pediatric infectious disease research in 2022.
Jane Fonda, Dolly’s co-star in the 1980 movie “9 to 5,” says, ““I never knew anyone like her. She was simultaneously a naughty, playful southern gal from the hollows of Tennessee and a deep, soulful thinker who could see through people right down to their true selves.”
At 9:25 p.m. (in reference to the movie) on Tuesday, the Empire State Building lit up in pink sparkle in Dolly’s honor.
Here are 15 “essential songs” of Dolly’s, according to the Times, which says: “Underlying each tune she sings, and lyric she writes, is the irreducible character of Dolly, a person so palpably genuine she became a virtual synonym for sincerity without ever seeming tedious or naïve.”
Here is Dolly’s life in pictures, from the Times.
Thank you, Dolly, for everything.
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