Dolly Parton, left, with her “Steel Magnolias” co-stars at the movie’s New York premiere in 1989. From left, Sally Field, Olympia Dukakis, Shirley MacLaine, Julia Roberts and Daryl Hannah.
Emily Langer
In a life described as taking her from “rags to rhinestones,” Dolly Parton and her blond bouffant - that mountain of hair even taller, it sometimes seemed, than the Tennessee foothills where she first strummed a guitar - carved out a singular place in our cultural life.
Like almost everything about Dolly, as she was universally known, that place was big - big enough to contain her devotees in the country music world, the Appalachian poor who saw their lives reflected in the lyrics of her thousands of original songs, the working women she cheered on in the 1980 Hollywood comedy “9 to 5” and the children she reached through her Imagination Library literacy programme. A centerpiece of her wide-ranging philanthropy, the initiative has provided more than 300 million free books to young readers around the world.
Dolly Parton, 80, “died peacefully” on Tuesday in Nashville, her team said. She faced “a brief battle with cancer” and died at the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center “surrounded by loved ones,” her publicist, Marcel Pariseau, said.
