How Dolly Parton built a life and career on her own terms

Jada Watson, University of Ottawa

In 2019, in the first episode of the Dolly Parton’s America podcast, Jad Abumrad asked Dolly Parton the question everyone eventually asked her: did she think of herself as a feminist? “No, I do not,” she said. “I think of myself as a woman in business.”

She spent six decades refusing a label that fit her better than almost anyone else in country music. “I think that I just live my femininity,” she told Sky News, a deflection she gave, in one form or another, for 50 years.

Parton passed away on Aug. 25 in Nashville, Tenn., at the age of 80. She may have been right that she never set out to be a feminist, but her career — the songs, the films, a lifetime of philanthropy — tells another story.

I’ve spent much of my career reading artists’ legacies in the songs that charted and, just as often, in the songs that didn’t. Parton’s chart history tells the story of an artist who broke through a landscape stacked against women, and spent her final years as a featured artist on songs by women who came after her.

Breaking into a male-dominated industry

Parton’s national breakthrough came in 1967, when Porter Wagoner hired her as a regular co-host and performer on his popular television show — a launching pad that put her in front of an audience she could not have reached at that point. But the same platform set terms she’d spend years working against.

For the first six years, Parton’s solo singles climbed modestly. “Dumb Blonde” peaked at 24 on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart, and “Something Fishy” and “Just Because I’m a Woman” both peaked at 17. Meanwhile, her collaborations with Wagoner resulted in a string of Top 10 records. As a collaborator, the ceiling was higher than as a solo artist.

As Parton recounted in her 1994 autobiography My Life and Other Unfinished Business, Wagoner produced her records, shaped her early RCA Victor output and owned a 49 per cent stake in her publishing company, Owepar.

Other women, including Melba Montgomery, Loretta Lynn, June Carter and Tammy Wynette, likewise appeared in male-led collaborations during a decade when women accounted for a small fraction of the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart. Wagoner gave Parton national exposure, but it increasingly hemmed in her ambitions as a solo artist and songwriter.

On her own terms

The turn came in the early 1970s, as Parton began pulling away from Wagoner and the No. 1s for her solo efforts accumulated. “Joshua” reached the top in 1971; then, in 1974, “Jolene” and “I Will Always Love You” followed, the latter written as a farewell to Wagoner as she prepared to leave their professional partnership.

Between 1971 and 1989, Parton logged 19 solo No. 1 singles and spent 27 weeks at the top — the sixth-most weeks at No. 1 by a solo female artist in the chart’s history — at a time when songs by women typically accounted for only 20 to 25 per cent of the chart.

Breaking with Wagoner gave Parton something she had spent years working toward: a career increasingly on her own terms. By the end of the 1970s, she was pushing beyond the country industry that had made her a star, first into pop and then into film.

In 1977, “Here You Come Again” crossed her into pop for the first time, spending five straight weeks at No. 1 on Hot Country Songs while climbing to No. 3 on the Hot 100.

Her audience was no longer bounded by the country chart, but neither had she left it behind. As music journalist Jewly Hight recently put it, Parton insisted she was not leaving her country-ness behind, but bringing it with her.

Writing women’s stories

Parton’s country No. 1s continued as she crossed into pop stardom and, in the 1980s, made her film debut alongside Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin in 9 to 5, a film rooted in the real-life organizing of women office workers for better pay, treatment and working conditions.

She wrote and recorded “9 to 5” for the film, turning the fight over pay inequity, workplace power and working conditions into a No. 1 country and pop anthem. Later that year, she included the song on 9 to 5 and Odd Jobs, an album that widened its focus to labour and economic precarity, with songs about miners, migrants and the poor.

These were not new concerns for Parton. On Dolly Parton’s America, she described writing about subjects that mattered to her, including abortion and adoption, even when other country songwriters avoided them.

“Down from Dover,” recorded for her 1970 album The Fairest of Them All, is one example. Three years before Roe v. Wade, it follows an unwed mother whose baby is stillborn — a subject Parton told Abumrad her label would not release as a single because radio would not touch it. “People didn’t talk about unwed mothers, much less a child dying and all that.”

The song left no chart trace, but it was part of Parton’s longstanding practice of telling women’s stories that were often overlooked.

A legacy of giving back

Parton’s philanthropy followed the same instincts. Her book-gifting program, The Imagination Library, distributed more than 300 million books worldwide. She donated millions to other causes, including disaster relief and COVID-19 vaccine research at Vanderbilt.

She also used royalties from Whitney Houston’s recording of “I Will Always Love You” to buy property in a historically Black neighbourhood — a purchase sometimes recounted as an act of philanthropy, though the reality was more complicated: the property became home to Parton’s business operations.

As her cultural and financial power grew, she used it on behalf of others, sometimes so quietly that the full extent of her generosity emerged only later.

But the mythology that grew around her generosity could sometimes outrun the facts — something Parton herself seemed wary of. She was “addicted to giving,” she said, but didn’t want to be worshipped for it.

A feminist in practice

Parton’s final chart appearances brought the story back to where it began: with Parton’s name beside someone else’s. In 2024, she was featured on Beyoncé’s “Tyrant” and Post Malone’s “Have the Heart.”

In March 2025, Sabrina Carpenter’s “Please Please Please” charted with Parton’s name beside hers. The young woman whose records once climbed higher with a man’s name beside hers was now the artist others sought to place beside their own.

Parton called herself a woman in business, not a feminist, for 50 years. But her 60-year career left a trail: in the control she claimed over her work, the space she made for women’s lives and ambitions, and the path she opened for those who came after her.

Near the end of the first episode of Dolly Parton’s America, Abumrad returned to the word Parton had resisted. “There were feminists in theory,” he said referring to journalist Sarah Smarsh, but there were also “feminists in practice.”

“That’s me, that’s me,” she said. “I think that’s a good way of saying it, ‘I live it.‘ I work it. And I think there’s power in it for me.”

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.