Sep 30, 2025, 11:19 PM GMT+7
- Before Dolly Parton was a country megastar, she grew up in a poor family in rural Tennessee.
- She wrote her first song at age 5 and played her first show at Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry at 13.
- Her scheduled Las Vegas residency has been postponed.
Dolly Parton’s journey from a humble two-room cabin in rural Tennessee to the bright lights of country music stardom is one of the most inspiring stories in the music industry.
Parton, 79, has become a cultural icon, celebrated not only for chart-topping hits like “9 to 5” and “I Will Always Love You,” but also for her philanthropy, business ventures, and effortless charm.
Here’s a complete timeline of Parton’s decades in the public eye and her remarkable career.
Dolly Parton was born in Locust Ridge, Tennessee, on January 19, 1946.
The fourth of 12 children, Parton was born to a poor family in rural Appalachia.
Parton’s father, Robert Lee, was a tobacco farmer and a construction worker who never learned to read or write, having dropped out of school as a young child.
Her mother, Avie Lee Owens, was a preacher’s daughter who spent most of her life raising and caring for her children.
Parton always knew she wanted to be a star. In the early days of her musical career, she sang barefoot on the front porch of her family’s home in the mountains, a two-room log cabin with no running water or electricity.
In 1951, at just 5 years old, Parton wrote her first song, “Little Tiny Tassel Top.”
Two years later, in 1953, Parton was so enthusiastic about playing music that she made her first guitar out of an old mandolin and two bass guitar strings, according to the Library of Congress.
Although Parton’s family was poor, a wealth of musical talent surrounded her.
Biography reported that Parton’s mother sang and played guitar. Her father also played the banjo and guitar, but it was her uncle Bill Owens whom Parton credits with launching her career.
Owens saw the potential in young Dolly and became her first manager, securing her first gig in 1956 as a regular performer on “The Cas Walker Show” in Knoxville, according to the Library of Congress.
He first introduced Parton to the multimillionaire Walker after somehow getting her backstage during the taping of one of his shows. Parton walked up to Walker and said she wanted to work for him, and it worked.
Parton professionally recorded her first single, “Puppy Love,” in 1957.
The Library of Congress reported that Parton wrote the song with her uncle when she was 11 and released the single, along with the B-track “Girl Left Alone,” on Goldband Records in 1959.
Speaking of the 30-hour bus ride to Lake Charles, Louisiana, to record the single, Parton has said, “I don’t think I’ll ever forget the way the inside of that bus smelled. It was a combination of diesel fuel, Naugahyde, and people who were going places.”
The single didn’t garner any commercial success.
At the age of 13, she performed at Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry for the first time.
Parton has said it was always her dream to perform at the Opry.
“For me, the Opry is like the song ‘New York, New York’ — if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere,” she said, according to her Opry artist bio.
At age 13, she got her chance. On the night of her performance, Johnny Cash introduced the young Parton and, after singing George Jones’ song “You Gotta Be My Baby,” she received three encores, the Library of Congress reported.
Parton was inducted into the Grand Ole Opry 10 years later in 1969, and in 2019, the TV special “Dolly Parton: 50 Years at the Opry” — though it had actually been 60 years — aired on NBC, honoring her first performance at the famed Opry House.
In a 2019 interview with Variety about the TV special, Parton reminisced about how informative those early days at the Opry were.
“I just have so many memories, even as a child watching the people backstage and just standing out there on that stage where all the great people stood, just thinking maybe some day I could be part of them,” Parton said.
“Now that I’ve been lucky enough and fortunate enough to see that dream come true, I wonder if some little kid might say ‘I bet Dolly Parton once stood here’ or ‘I’m standing where Dolly Parton stood.'”
From 1962 to 1966, Parton and her uncle had mixed success writing and recording songs.
The duo was signed to Tree Publishing and Mercury Records in Nashville in 1962 and recorded the songs “It’s Sure Gonna Hurt” and “The Love You Gave.”
The songs didn’t make the charts, and the label dropped Parton and Owens, according to the Library of Congress.
Despite this, Parton has said it was magical hearing herself on the radio.
“I will never forget hearing [myself] on a Knoxville station, WIVK,” she said. “There I was, actually hearing myself sing, not on a tape or studio monitor but on a real radio station that thousands of people were listening to… at that very moment.
“I was so proud I walked around for days with my chest all stuck out,” she said. “Somehow, nobody noticed.”
Parton recorded and released six songs on the album “Hits Made Famous by Country Queens” in 1963. In 1965, she and her uncle were signed by Fred Foster to Combine Publishing House and Monument Records.
The following year, Bill Phillips charted in the Top 10 twice thanks to two songs written by Parton and Owens: “Put It Off Until Tomorrow” and “The Company You Keep.”
In May 1966, Parton married her husband, Carl Dean.
Parton was 18 when she met 21-year-old Dean outside the Wishy Washy Laundromat in Nashville in 1964.
They were married in Georgia against the wishes of her record label, which thought that marriage would hamper the singer’s career.
“It was just my mother, and Carl, and me,” Parton told CMT in 2016. “We went across the state line to Ringgold, Georgia. My mother made me a little white dress and a little bouquet and a little Bible. But I said, ‘I can’t get married in a courthouse because I’ll never feel married.’ So we found a little Baptist church in town, and went up to Pastor Don Duvall and said, ‘Would you marry us?’ We got pictures on the steps right outside the church.”
Despite his wife’s fame, Dean, a retired businessman who once ran an asphalt-laying company, preferred to stay out of the public eye.
Parton and Dean were married for nearly 60 years before Dean died on March 3 at the age of 82.
