Dolly Parton Died at 80 in Nashville. Her Publicist Says the Cause Was Cancer.

Dolly Parton died peacefully in Nashville on Aug. 25, her representatives said in a statement confirming the death. She was 80. Her publicist, Marcel Pariseau, later told the Associated Press that the cause was a brief battle with cancer.

The confirmation came in two parts — a written statement from her representatives and a video posted to social media by her nephew, Bryan Seaver. "A rhinestone life that shone bright enough for the world to see," the statement read, "Dolly will forever stand as an inspiration not only through her timeless music and prolific songwriting, but also her wit, warmth, and kindness that made us all feel like family."

Parton grew up one of 12 children in a rural hamlet in the Smoky Mountains of East Tennessee, and she never stopped telling audiences about it. "I remember the time we didn't have electricity in the early days," she told NPR's Morning Edition in 2002. "And I was thinking how far I've come from no electricity to now living in this high-tech world, selling my records, as they are." She was writing songs and singing on local radio as a child, and she left for Nashville as soon as she graduated from high school in 1964.

She insisted for six decades that the writing, not the wigs, was the engine. "It was my songwriting that got me out of the Smoky Mountains," she told Morning Edition in 1989. "The fact that I had this outrageous look, that helped. And the fact that I've had a good, outgoing personality and a good, healthy attitude has helped too. But to me, the guts and the root of the whole thing is the writing." Her first No. 1 hit, 1970's "Joshua," was hers alone. So were "Coat of Many Colors," "My Tennessee Mountain Home" and "Jolene."

Her career had an unusual shape: she started as the female half of Porter Wagoner's television act, the standard opening available to women in Nashville at the time, and then left it in 1974 to go solo, softening the exit with a farewell ballad called "I Will Always Love You." Whitney Houston's version, from the 1992 film "The Bodyguard," turned it into one of the best-known recordings in American popular music. Parton crossed into pop with "Here You Come Again" in 1977, into disco production the following year, and into film with "9 to 5," "The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas" and "Steel Magnolias."

She opened Dollywood in the Smokies and was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2022 — an honor she initially tried to decline before embracing it with a rock album. She was also unusually clear-eyed about the persona. "It's true I look totally artificial," she said in a 2014 interview. "But I like to think I'm totally real where it really counts. It's just a country girl's idea of glamour." Onstage in London in 1983 she put it more bluntly: "You'd be amazed at the price of industrial bras these days."

Her husband of nearly six decades, Carl Dean, died in March 2025. At the time of her death, a new answer song to "Jolene," featuring a guest appearance from Parton herself, was still getting country radio airplay.