Dolly Parton is one of the most famous, most successful,
and most universally beloved performers in American history.
Parton wasn't born into showbiz — she came from humble beginnings, and she wasn't alone.
Parton is one of 12 children, all of whom have their own story to tell.
Dolly Parton is the fourth-oldest sibling in a family that would come
to include a total of 12 children born to Robert and Avie Lee Parton .
Robert Lee Parton came from a long line of farmers, and early in adulthood,
he toiled as a sharecropper. By the time Dolly turned 5 in 1951, Lee had acquired his own
parcel of land in Sevier County, Tenn., which he used to farm tobacco and raise livestock.
To help fund his large family's needs, he also worked in construction.
The patriarch of the Parton family died in August 2003 at age 79, after suffering from
a series of strokes. His death preceded 80-year-old Avie Lee's by four months.
The couple married in 1939, when Avie, raised in a family of musicians and
the daughter of a South Carolina preacher, was just 19 years old.
While Dolly Parton was storming her way up the country charts over and over again in
the 1960s and 1970s, her younger sister, Stella Parton, was right there behind her.
Not only has she formed her own record label, but since the early 70s,
she's released more than 30 albums full of country, traditional, and spiritual music,
with her most fruitful and prominent period of success coming in the 70s and 80s.
Stella scored a long string of moderate and minor hits on Billboard's country chart,
including the 1975 top 10 single, "I Want to Hold You in My Dreams Tonight," followed by Top
20 smashes like "Standard Lie Number One," "The Danger of a Stranger," and "Four Little Letters."
How does Stella's voice sound? Some might say a lot like that of Dolly,
which helped offer audiences a seamless transition when Stella starred in a touring production of the
musical The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas just after Dolly headlined the film version.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, country went pop, thanks to the John Travolta movie Urban
Cowboy and performers with mainstream appeal, like Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton. In the wake of
that, Dolly's brother, Randy Parton, signed a deal with RCA Records and released a few recordings.
In 1982, he appeared on the country showcase show Pop Goes the Country to perform "Roll
On (Eighteen Wheeler)," a rock-tinged tune about a long-haul trucker. That song wasn't
a hit for Randy, but in 1984, Alabama covered it and took it to No. 1 on the country chart.
In the early 80s, he had a few moderate successes of his own,
such as the Top 30 hits, "Hold Me Like You Never Had Me" and "Shot Full of Love."
As the decade progressed, Randy collaborated with his very successful sister more,
playing bass in her live band and backing her up as a member
of the Cut N' Slice Band in her 1984 musical comedy Rhinestone.
In the mid-2000s, Randy struck a lucrative deal with the city of Roanoke Rapids, N.C.,
which paid him a $1.5 million annual salary to manage and perform at the Randy Parton Theater,
the centerpiece of a planned entertainment complex. (He
also got a fully furnished home and use of a car in the deal.)
By 2008, Randy had left the project after a series of business disagreements.
He passed away in January 2021.
Beginning in his early 20s,
Floyd Parton toiled as a songwriter in the Nashville country music scene for years.
Some of his biggest successes arrived when his big-voiced older sister took a hold of them.
Floyd and Dolly Parton's collaborative composition,
"Nickels and Dimes," was included on the latter's 1978 album Heartbreaker,
and Floyd alone wrote "Waltz Me to Heaven," a soundtrack cut from Dolly's 1984 movie Rhinestone.
In 1991 Dolly and Ricky Van Shelton made a duet out of Floyd's "Rockin' Years,"
which went all the way to No. 1 on the country chart. Floyd also wrote songs for George Jones
and two of his other musically inclined family members, Stella and his twin sister, Freida.
Floyd passed away in December 2018 at the age of 61.
Dolly Parton gave acting a shot in the 1980s, starting with 9 to 5,
a dark comedy about workplace revenge costarring Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin. Released in 1980, the
film earned $103 million, meaning it was popular enough for ABC to adapt it into a sitcom in 1982.
Parton was a little too busy and famous to reprise her role as Doralee Rhodes,
so producers instead cast 22-year-old Hollywood newcomer Rachel Dennison. She bore an uncanny
resemblance to Parton, which is to be expected, since Dennison is Parton's younger sister.
Prior to her role on TV's 9 to 5, Dennison worked as a makeup artist for her superstar sibling.
She got her chance at TV stardom when Jane Fonda visited Parton at the Grand Ole Opry in 1981.
Upon meeting her sister, Tomlin thought Dennison would be perfect for the sitcom
adaptation of 9 to 5, which she was producing. She told People,
"I asked Dolly's permission to bring Rachel out to read for the part.
As soon as she stepped foot on the lot, everyone started calling asking who she was."
9 to 5 lasted five seasons, with Dennison appearing in all 85 episodes,
but after the show wrapped in 1988, she never acted again.
More than a decade younger than her celebrity sister, Freida Parton left the family home
in Tennessee at age 13 to go live with Dolly Parton in Nashville. Not yet 20,
she married Mark Andersen, part of Dolly's backing band, and together they'd collaborate on "Sing for
the Common Man," a track which appeared on her sister's 1980 album 9 to 5 and Odd Jobs.
Soon after, Freida landed a record deal and released her debut LP, Two-Faced, in 1984.
Unlike her musically inclined siblings, Freida didn't show much interest for country and its
associated genres — Two-Faced is a pretty heavy hard rock album.
Outside of music, Freida has lived a colorful life. As of 2014, she's been married and
divorced four times but still believes in love, opening and subsequently managing and
performing services at the Parton Family Wedding Chapel in Sevierville, Tennessee .
Dolly Parton has always proudly embraced her heritage as a member of a big family
from rural Tennessee. Her sister, Willadeene Parton, emerged as the family's historian,
capturing in print the Partons' collective childhoods and along
the way becoming a chronicler of a broader culture at large.
Usually going by the pen name of simply "Willadeene," the author in the family
has published three books – In the Shadow of a Song: The Story of the Parton Family in 1985,
Smoky Mountain Memories: Stories from the Hearts of the Parton Family in 1996, and All-Day Singing
& Dinner on the Ground in 1997, a collection of stories and classic Southern recipes.
In 2013, Dolly Parton made a special appearance at her Dollywood theme park
and entertainment complex to unveil a new section of the Chasing Rainbows Museum,
one dedicated to her maternal uncle, Bill Owens, her first manager and champion of
her musical skills. Standing beside him at the ribbon-cutting ceremony, she recalled,
"[He] saw me when I was just a little thing,
singing my songs, and doing my stuff, saying 'Hey, I think we can make some money at this."
"He's actually been the one that's helped me more than anyone else through the years."
Parton was about 10 years old and washing dishes when Owens, a singer,
songwriter, and guitar player, took notice. As he later said,
"I thought she could be a star the first time I heard her in that kitchen,"
Before long, he took her to sing on The Cas Walker Show, a Knoxville, Tennessee-based radio variety
show. Producers were so impressed they hired Parton to be a regular performer -- and Dolly
realized she'd found the thing that she was going to do for the rest of her life.
When Parton got a bit older, she started writing songs with Owens, and they landed
a deal with Combine Music, then formed their own music publishing company, Owe-Par.
One of the duo's first and biggest professional successes came when country star Bill Phillips
recorded hit versions of their songs "The Company You Keep" and "Put It Off Until Tomorrow."
As Parton became a major star in the 1970s, Owens continued to strike it big as a songwriter,
penning tunes for the likes of Loretta Lynn, Ricky Skaggs, Crystal Gayle, and Kris Kristofferson.
Avie Lee Parton was a mother of 12 by the time that she was 35,
and so she delegated child-rearing duties of some of the younger kids to some of her older kids.
At a 2015 press event promoting Coat of Many Colors, the TV movie about her childhood in
Tennessee, Parton told reporters about the way the kids chipped in to help raise each other.
"My mother, through the years, when we were born, since there were so many of us, used to say,
'This one is gonna be you baby.' That just meant that you got to take extra care of it.
You have got to get up with it at night and rock it back and forth."
Upon his birth in July 1955, newborn Larry Parton
was assigned in such a manner to Dolly, age 9 at the time.
Tragically, the newest addition to the Parton brood suffered from health problems,
and just four days after he was born, he passed away.
Parton said that it was tough to address and relive the heartache surrounding Larry's
death when it was depicted onscreen in Coat of Many Colors. But in life,
she said, even pain is worth it. As she put it,
"All things are hard, but that is what makes your
memories. That is what makes you who and what you are."
Born into a huge family, Dolly Parton didn't grow up to have a big brood
of her own — she never had biological children, but that suited her just fine.
Parton told People Country,
"Several of my brothers and sisters came to live with me early on in my life.
I've loved their kids just like they're my grandkids."
She also added that her many nieces and nephews have a nickname for her: "Aunt Granny."
One of those nieces is singer Heidi Parton. Daughter of Randy Parton and his wife, Deb,
Heidi started regularly performing at her aunt's Dollywood theme park
from the age of 4 up until she turned 19.
Sadly, the Parton family lost one of its own in 2017. Tever Parton , Dolly Parton's
niece and Heidi Parton's older sister, passed away at age 36 in March 2017.
Dolly Parton makes a lot of public appearances but generally does them alone. It's not that
the enchanting singer is forever single — she's been married to first and only husband Carl Dean
since 1966, a man who doesn't want to have anything to do with show business.
Parton's husband is so rarely photographed that some have theorized that he doesn't actually
exist. Speaking about her spouse, Parton told Entertainment Tonight,
"A lot of people have thought that through the years, because he does not want to be in the
spotlight at all. It's just not who he is. He's like a quiet, reserved person and he figured if
he ever got out there in that, he'd never get a minute’s peace and he's right about that."
When they do go out together, she says, it's not to gallivant around the world. Instead,
it's to take private little adventures in their RV to do things like hit up the Taco Bell drive-thru,
which Dean has plenty of time to do ever since he retired from running his asphalt-paving business.
"How could you be, how -- what's your secret? I say, 'Well, I stay gone!'
Actually, my husband's a homebody, and I love to travel."
At least one of Parton's most famous songs is about her husband.
Her 1973 hit "Jolene" concerns a redheaded temptress with designs on the narrator's man,
and the singer begs and pleads to not steal him away with her wiles and beauty "beyond compare."
While Jolene's name and appearance came from a young fan Parton met in the 1960s, the character
is based on a bank teller who flirted heavily with Dean. Parton told NPR's All Things Considered,
"She got this terrible crush on my husband. And he just loved going to the bank because
she paid him so much attention. It was kinda like a running joke between us."
Not every member of Dolly Parton's large family sought a career in entertainment.
Unlike the Jackson family from nearby Indiana, in which every kid gave music a try,
a few of the Partons of Tennessee hung back and have lived private, quiet lives -- at
least compared to Dolly, the music legend, movie star and theme park entrepreneur.
Among them, Cassie Nan Parton dabbles in music, and in 2013 she performed alongside
her more outgoing siblings in My People, a live show at Dollywood.
She also has a brother named Bobby Lee Parton who stayed in Tennessee, as well as another
brother named Coy Denver Parton, the father of two daughters, one of whom he named Dolly.
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