Dolly Parton, singer-songwriter, 1946-2026

Dolly Parton was at once larger than life and down to earth. The Nashville star, who has died aged 80, was a vision of fabulous folksiness with her blonde wigs, rhinestones and dazzling smile. She wrote songs in industrial quantities, about 3,000 in her estimation, but performed them with a very human wit and warmth. With more than 100mn record sales to her name and a renown stretching far beyond the boundaries of her genre, she ranks among the greatest artists in the history of country music.

She was born in rural Tennessee in 1946, at the edge of the Great Smoky Mountains. Her father was a sharecropper who later became a tobacco farmer. Her mother had 12 children, including Parton, by the age of 35. It was an impoverished upbringing. According to Parton, her penniless father paid the doctor who delivered her with a sack of cornmeal. "I have often joked that I have been raking in the dough ever since," she wrote in her autobiography, Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business .

There was neither self-pity nor selfishness in her passage from rags to riches. She sang about being mocked by schoolmates for wearing a coat made from scraps of fabric in "Coat of Many Colors". "I couldn't understand it, for I felt I was rich," Parton sang in the 1971 signature song. "And I told them of the love my momma sewed in every stitch." At this point in the song, a key change lifts us up too.

She could dole out schmaltz with the best of them, although she was a sophisticated singer and songwriter too. Drawn to music from a young age, she was brought up amid the music of church and family gatherings rather than records or radio. After graduating from high school, she left home for Nashville in 1964. Another autobiographical song, "The Letter", evokes the small-town girl's first weeks in Music City, singing on morning television shows and writing hits for other acts.

Her first country hit as a recording artist came in 1967 with the single "Dumb Blonde". "This dumb blonde ain't nobody's fool," she sang. It was penned by another Nashville songwriter, but the mix of self-mockery and defiance was typical of Parton . Country music's tradition of strong womanhood allowed a certain degree of challenge to its even more powerful culture of sexism. Parton was audacious yet also astute in testing the limits that she faced.

Initially, her extravagantly quivering voice was divisive. "I just don't think the girl can sing," a record executive told Nashville veteran Porter Wagoner when he proposed teaming with Parton as a duo in 1967. Wagoner insisted, and the partnership was a success. It provided the platform for her solo career to blossom in the early 1970s with hits such as "Coat of Many Colors".