In Memoriam
Dolly Rebecca Parton
1946 – 2026
She died on August 25, 2026, in Nashville, at 80. Her family said she died peacefully. For a firm that works a few miles from Music Row, in a state she spent her life describing to the rest of the world, the loss is close to home.
Dolly Parton was born in Sevier County, one of twelve children in a family she described as dirt poor. That upbringing was not a detail she left behind once the money arrived. It stayed in the songwriting, and it stayed in what she chose to do with the proceeds.
She wrote hundreds of songs across seven decades, among them “Jolene,” “Coat of Many Colors,” and “I Will Always Love You,” work that sold more than 100 million records worldwide and drew more than a billion streams. She was among the most nominated women in Grammy history, winning ten of them, and was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame, the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. She was a National Medal of the Arts honoree, a Kennedy Center honoree, and in 2025 received the Academy’s Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award.
She was also, plainly, one of the most consequential businesspeople in Tennessee. She bought a theme park in Pigeon Forge in 1986 and renamed it Dollywood. It is now Sevier County’s largest employer, credited with more than 23,000 jobs and roughly $1.8 billion in annual economic activity. When wildfires tore through the Smokies in 2016, she organized a telethon and set up a fund that sent monthly checks to families who had lost their homes.
The book lady
Her father quit school to work the farm and never learned to read well. In 1995 she started mailing free books to children in her home county in his honor. The Imagination Library sends an age-appropriate book every month to any enrolled child from birth to kindergarten, at no cost to the family and without regard to income.
It grew past Sevier County, then past Tennessee, then past the United States, into Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Ireland. It added audio and braille editions in 2011. It passed its hundred millionth book in 2018 and its hundred fiftieth in 2020. Children called her the book lady, and she said her father took great pride in it.
That program is why this page exists on a law firm’s website. Our clients are people building a life in a new country, often with young children and often reading in a second language at home. A free book in the mailbox every month, addressed to the child by name, asking nothing in return, is not a small thing to those families. It is the kind of institution that quietly makes a place easier to arrive in.
In recent years she spoke openly about aging and about what she hoped would outlast her, saying she wanted her work to be of use to other people after she was gone. Governor Bill Lee, proclaiming Dolly Parton Day earlier this year for her eightieth birthday, wrote that her generosity, humility, and dedication to improving the lives of others exemplify the values of the Volunteer State.
In lieu of flowers
Her family asked that donations be made in her memory to the Imagination Library rather than sending flowers. Enrollment is also free for any eligible child in a participating community, including many across Tennessee.