The much-loved US singer-songwriter, actress and philanthropist Dolly Parton, who has died aged 80, was known as the Queen of Country.
Raised in Tennessee, she rose to fame in the late 1960s with hits that bridged country and pop music.
Her songs covered deeply personal themes around growing up poor, love and loss, as well as female empowerment and spirituality.
Following Parton’s death, here is a look back at her life through the lens of six iconic songs.
1. Coat of Many Colours
The autobiographical track, taken from the album of the same name, tells the heart-stirring tale of how she grew up poor – as one of 12 siblings – but rich in love.
In her book, Songteller: My Life in Lyrics, Parton described it as a “little story” that covers “a world of things”, with teachings about bullying, acceptance, love and good parenting.
2. Jolene
Parton penned many songs about all different aspects of her relationship with her devoted husband Carl Dean, who ran an asphalt paving business in Nashville.
This included the fear that she might lose him, specifically to a red-headed bank clerk who had flirted with him early on in their marriage. We all know her by now, of course, as the infamous Jolene.
3. I Will Always Love You
Despite the romantic sounding title, this 1974 song is actually the sound of Parton tenderly asking her musical mentor, Porter Wagoner, to let her go and pursue her solo career. Parton was 21 when she joined Wagoner’s variety TV show. They released a string of duets and toured together, leading fans to think they were an item. But they had a complicated relationship, with Parton later writing in another book, Star of the Show: My Life on Stage, that she felt Wagoner saw her rise as a “threat”.
Elvis Presley was set to record a cover of the song in 1974, but Parton made the difficult decision to back out of the deal when his manager demanded half of the songwriting rights.
“I said, ‘I can’t do that’,” she told Howard Stern in 2023. “Of course I cried all night about that.”
Parton re-recorded I Will Always Love You in 1982 for her starring role in the musical comedy film, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.
But arguably the most iconic version comes courtesy of Whitney Houston who can be heard booming it out in another film, 1992’s The Bodyguard. Her version remains the biggest-selling US single by a female artist.
Parton said she heard the power ballad version for the first time on the radio, and felt so overwhelmed that she had to pull over to avoid crashing her Cadillac.
Whitney Houston took her “little country song” and made it “so much more”, she said. —BBC
