Dolly Parton Wrote Her Last Chapter to Be the Best One

In May 2024, Dollywood opened a new kind of exhibit: a full multimedia walk through Dolly Parton's life, built to feel closer to how she told her own story than static displays ever could. She described the choice plainly: digital presentation reached people in a way that objects behind glass no longer did. For an artist whose career ran seven decades, the format said something about the moment she was in. It was a story she was still writing, and she knew it.

"And then when you see that whole body of work, yeah," she said of walking through it. "It's like, wow, that's a lot of times. That's a lot of miles traveled, a lot of tears shed, you know, a lot of pain. And a lot of joy." She paused on what that kind of accumulation does to a person. "To see your whole life laid out before you in a museum like that, especially at my age... I'll do some more things hopefully, like my Broadway musical and other things. My life story is that I'm sure there'll be other projects, but for the most part, I've pretty much... I've written most of the chapters. I'm on my last chapter because of my age and everything, but I want it to really be the best one. I want the story to end really well."

Parton traced her earliest sense of herself as an artist to two people. Her uncle Bill, a musician, recognized how serious she was by the time she was seven or eight and started co-writing songs with her. Her mother gave her something different: a stage. She'd have young Dolly perform new songs for visitors, and the attention that came back became, in Parton's own words, something she got "addicted to." Long before Nashville, before any of the songs people would come to know her for, there was a small girl handed proof that what she made was worth an audience's full attention.

That belief pulled her out of the Great Smoky Mountains. Parton grew up in Locust Ridge, a small community in Sevier County, Tennessee, and in 1964, the day after she graduated high school, she left for Nashville to become a recording star, and singers turned her down for years before her break came sideways: providing uncredited harmony vocals on Bill Phillips' 1966 hit "Put It Off Until Tomorrow," a song she'd co-written with her uncle Bill, which put her name in front of radio programmers.

Ask Parton what she was, before singer or actress or businesswoman, and the answer was writer. She called songwriting her therapist. It didn't arrive on a schedule. It interrupted her doing laundry, putting on makeup, whatever she was doing, and if she didn't stop and get it down immediately, it was gone. She kept a notepad within reach at all times, because the songs came and went on their own schedule. The opening line of "9 to 5," written in 1980 for the film of the same name, arrived complete, by her account, with almost no effort on her part. It was a strange thing to hear from someone with her output: that the writing she was most known for sometimes felt less like labor and more like taking dictation.

When Beyoncé recorded "Jolene" for her 2024 album Cowboy Carter, Parton expected a cover. What she got was a reworking, and she found herself pleasantly surprised. To her, an artist who reinterpreted a song was paying the higher compliment. Coming from a writer who guarded her own material for decades, that was a notable thing to say.

Beyoncé's reworking of "Jolene," from Cowboy Carter (2024).

The Porter Wagoner years were the most complicated part of Parton's story. She joined The Porter Wagoner Show in 1967, and Wagoner mentored her and built her a national audience while also keeping her from working with other producers or appearing on other artists' shows. Leaving meant confronting the man who had launched her career and, in some ways, controlled it. Instead of having that conversation directly, she wrote one of the most enduring songs of her career and sang it to him. "I Will Always Love You," written and released in 1974, the year she left the show, was her way out, delivered as a gift instead of a confrontation. The relationship mended over the years that followed, and she was with him when he died in 2007.

The same song nearly went to Elvis Presley that same year. He wanted to record it, and by Parton's account it was close, until his manager Colonel Tom Parker demanded half the publishing rights as the price of admission. She said no. She called it one of the hardest decisions of her career, and Elvis's version went unrecorded. Years later she wrote a tribute imagining the duet that didn't happen, recorded with an Elvis sound-alike standing in for the voice that missed its chance the first time around.

Ask Parton about legacy and she moved away from the catalog fast. "I love the idea of my roots, my musical roots and involving my family," she said, "but I want to be known as someone that cared not only just about myself and about my music and about my family." She pointed instead to the Imagination Library, the book-gifting program she founded in 1995 that mailed a child a book every month from birth until they started school. It began because her father couldn't read or write, and she built it around getting him involved. It surpassed 200 million books gifted worldwide by 2023. "So that's part of my legacy that I'm proud of," she said. "But I'd like to be thought of as a decent human being."

She wanted people to smile and think she was funny. And when asked what she hoped would remain after everything else faded, she kept it small and unadorned: "I just hope I leave something good behind for other people to enjoy and to draw from."

Much of the archive behind the Dollywood exhibit existed because Parton hadn't thought to save it herself. It was her lifelong best friend and family members who kept the handwritten lyrics, the early photographs, the dry-cleaning tag with a song scrawled across it in the middle of an errand. She called herself a workhorse that looked like a show horse.

Parton died on August 25, 2026, in Nashville, at age 80, a little more than two years after The Dolly Parton Experience opened. The last chapter she wanted to end well came to a close less than two years later. By her own accounting, she had already written most of it, and she wanted it to be the best one.

Quotes and interview details in this piece are drawn from a 2024 interview Dolly Parton gave to CBS. Watch the interview.

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