Jane Fonda’s tribute to her 9 to 5 co-star says it all. But the real lesson of Dolly Parton’s extraordinary life is how a girl from a one-room cabin built an empire on her own terms – and never once apologised for who she was.
“I never knew anyone like her.”
Five words from Jane Fonda, posted to her 2.8 million followers within hours of the news that Dolly Parton had died in Nashville on 25 August, aged 80, after a brief battle with cancer. Fonda, who recruited Dolly for 9 to 5 back in 1980, went further. She said that Dolly, more than anyone she had ever known, would always be with us – because she was so present, so powerful, so generous and playful that she was woven into all our lives and hearts forever.
She described her friend as both a ‘naughty, playful southern girl’ from the hollows of Tennessee and a deep, soulful thinker who could see straight through people to who they really were. And then she said the thing that, to me, captures Dolly better than any award ever could: she had a survivor’s instinct and always seemed to know exactly what to do and what to say.
That instinct is the story. Not the wigs. Not the rhinestones. The instinct.
The girl who became an empire
Dolly Rebecca Parton was born on 19 January 1946, the fourth of 12 children of a tobacco farmer, and grew up in a one-room cabin at Locust Ridge in the Great Smoky Mountains with no electricity and no running water. She had her first real guitar at eight, was on local radio at 11 and on the Grand Ole Opry stage at 13. The day after she finished high school in 1964, she caught the bus to Nashville.
Nashville, in its wisdom, decided her high soprano with its rapid-fire vibrato was unsuitable for country music. So she made her name as a songwriter first. Then Porter Wagoner heard “Dumb Blonde” and put her on his television show, where she stayed for seven years – until her fame outgrew his, and she walked.
What followed is a career with few equals in any field. More than 160 million albums sold, making her the best-selling female country artist of all time. Eleven Grammys from 54 nominations – behind only Beyoncé and Taylor Swift among women. Two Oscar nominations for Best Original Song. A Kennedy Centre Honour, the National Medal of Arts and, in 2025, the Academy’s Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. Hundreds of millions of books placed in the hands of children. A theme park that became the largest employer in its region.
This week the Empire State Building turned pink for her, and flags across the United States were ordered to half-mast. Her family put it simply: her legacy is one of love, compassion and resilience.
“I look like a woman, but I think like a man,” Dolly Parton said.
Dolly never pretended the look was an accident. She called it a country girl’s idea of glamour and joked that she’d never been offended by dumb blonde jokes, because she knew she wasn’t dumb and, as it happened, she also knew she wasn’t blonde.
But her most revealing line was about business, not beauty. “I look like a woman, but I think like a man,” she once said – adding that in the world of business it had helped her enormously, because by the time the men across the table worked out that she knew exactly what was going on, she’d already taken the money and gone.
If ever a quote deserved to be a Dolly song, it’s that one. You can practically hear the banjo.
She was utterly unsentimental about the dynamic in the room. She admitted to opening business meetings by giving the men a minute to look at what they were going to look at anyway – and then insisting they listen, because she was there to make money for everyone at the table. It’s the same self-awareness that made her a brilliant performer: she understood the audience better than the audience understood itself.
The Elvis decision
If you want a single case study in Dolly’s business mind, it’s 1975. Elvis Presley wanted to record “I Will Always Love You”. For a young country singer, that was the biggest door in the world swinging open. Then Colonel Tom Parker told her Elvis would need half the publishing rights.
She said no. She later said it broke her heart, but she couldn’t let it happen.
Seventeen years on, driving her Cadillac, she heard Whitney Houston’s a cappella opening come through the radio and had to pull over because she was afraid she’d crash the car. That song – the one she refused to give away – became one of the most successful recordings in history, and every cent of the songwriting royalties came home to Tennessee.
Around the same time, she took a struggling attraction in Pigeon Forge and, in 1986, turned it into Dollywood. It is now credited with creating thousands of jobs and generating close to US$2 billion a year for the region. She said she liked the business end of things and got that from her father – a man who never learned to read, but who she always said was the smartest person she ever knew.
What we can learn from Dolly
I have spent more than four decades in women’s media, and I’ve watched a lot of women be told to be one thing or the other – glamorous or serious, warm or tough, an artist or an operator. Dolly’s whole life was a refusal to choose. Here is what I’d pull out of it for any woman building something of her own:
- Own your IP. She kept her publishing when it cost her Elvis. Everything else she built sat on that foundation. Know what you own, and don’t trade it for a moment in the spotlight.
- Let people underestimate you – then don’t be there when they work it out. She never fought the “dumb blonde” image. She invoiced it.
- Diversify from your core. Music funded film, film funded the park, the park funded the foundation. Every arm reinforced the brand.
- Know your audience better than they know themselves. From Dollywood to Grace and Frankie, she met people exactly where they were.
- Give back on purpose. Her philanthropy wasn’t a footnote; it was strategy, identity and legacy at once.
The struggles she never hid
Dolly was open about the hard parts. The poverty was real – “Coat of Many Colours”, the song she said was her favourite, came from a childhood where a patchwork coat made from rags was worn to school with pride and greeted with laughter. She was dismissed by the industry that later crowned her. Her split from Wagoner ended in legal disputes before it ended amicably. The 1980s brought health problems and a period of depression she later spoke about candidly.
More recently, the losses came closer. Carl Dean, the man she met outside a laundromat on her first day in Nashville and married in 1966, died last year after nearly 60 years of marriage. She wrote him a song, “If You Hadn’t Been There”. Her own health then forced her to postpone and finally cancel a Las Vegas residency. When her sister asked publicly for prayers last October, Dolly’s response was pure Dolly: she posted a video to declare that she wasn’t dead yet.
Her philosophy for getting through all of it was never complicated.
“The way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain,” she liked to say.
Find out who you are and do it on purpose. Take each day as it comes, do the best you can with it, and don’t waste time pretending to be somebody else. She said she was born with a happy heart, and she spent 80 years proving that optimism is not the absence of hardship, it’s a decision you make in the middle of it.
The songs and films that gave women their voice
Long before “empowerment” was a marketing word, Dolly was writing it into three-minute country songs.
As early as 1968, “Just Because I’m a Woman” called out the double standard that judged her past and forgave her husband’s. In 1977, having just walked away from Wagoner, she wrote “Light of a Clear Blue Morning” – a song about the first day after you leave, and the freedom on the other side of the fear. She re-recorded it this year with Queen Latifah, Reba McEntire, Lainey Wilson and her goddaughter Miley Cyrus for its 50th anniversary, donating the proceeds to paediatric cancer research.
Then there is the extraordinary productivity of 1973. Dolly told The Bobby Bones Show that she wrote “Jolene” and “I Will Always Love You” on the same day – though, typically honest, she later said she couldn’t be sure they were written the same night. Either way: one of the great songs about female rivalry and one of the great songs about walking away from a man who shaped your career, written within hours of each other. “Jolene”, incidentally, was inspired by a bank teller who’d taken a shine to Carl.
And, of course, “9 to 5”. Fonda cast Dolly in the 1980 film alongside Lily Tomlin, and the three of them took down a sexist boss in a comedy that still plays like a documentary in far too many workplaces. Dolly wrote the title song – tapping the rhythm out on her acrylic nails – and it earned her an Oscar nomination and became the anthem for every woman who has ever been passed over, talked over or paid less. The story is now a stage musical.
Steel Magnolias (1989) gave her Truvy, the hairdresser who holds a Louisiana town’s women together with hairspray and hard truth. The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1982) and Rhinestone (1984) proved she could carry a film. And in the final episode of Grace and Frankie, she turned up as the head working-class angel in heaven – the episode Fonda has now asked fans to watch in her honour.
A legacy that reaches children globally
If you want to understand what Dolly did with her money, look at the Imagination Library. Founded in 1995 in memory of the father who couldn’t read, it posts a free book every month to children from birth to age five. It has now given away more than 300 million books, and it operates in Australia, Canada, Ireland, the UK and the US.
She gave US$1 million to Vanderbilt to fund the research that helped produce Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine, and she stepped in for East Tennessee families after the 2016 wildfires. Her family has asked that, in lieu of flowers, donations go to the Imagination Library. Check the link below.
The last word
Jane Fonda, another female inspiration for me, ended her tribute with instructions, and they are worth following. Dolly, she said, doesn’t want anyone mourning. Dress up. Celebrate her spirit.
That is another Dolly lesson here. Put on the rhinestones, walk into the room, let them underestimate you – and build something that outlasts all of it.
Donations in Dolly Parton’s memory can be made to Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, which delivers free books to Australian children under five: imaginationlibrary.com
