Nashville, TN (August 25, 2026)—Singer, songwriter, actress and country music icon Dolly Parton has died, her family has announced.
Parton’s nephew, Brian Seaver, made the announcement in a video posted to social media, saying: “This video announcement is something Dolly asked of me years ago, before I fully absorbed it as a future reality. As her head of security for more than two decades, a role my father Larry held before me, I have imagined the heaviness of this moment but haven’t truly felt it ‘til now,”
Parton’s health issues have been in the news since late 2025, when she pulled out of the Motion Picture Academy’s Governors Awards, where she was to receive the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, and canceled her December residency at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas.
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Parton sold more than 100 million records and won 11 Grammy Awards during her six-decade career. A shrewd businesswoman, she maintained artistic control of her endeavors and is said to have amassed a $650 million fortune, putting her earnings to good use through the Dollywood Foundation, which funds poverty relief and educational programs in her home state of Tennessee. In 2020, she donated $1 million toward Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine research.
Born in a one-room cabin in East Tennessee, the fourth of 12 children, on January 19, 1946, Parton wrote her first song, “Little Tiny Tassel Top,” at age six. In 1964, after graduating high school, she went to Nashville to write songs, including for her uncle, Bill Owens. Her first single, “Hello, I’m Dolly,” was released three years after she left school.
She scored her first country chart hit with “Jolene” in 1974. “I Will Always Love You,” perhaps her best-known song, also topped the country charts—in two different versions, first in 1974 and again in 1982—and later delivered a massive hit for Whitney Houston in 1992.
Parton released her first self-produced album in 1977. With New Harvest…First Harvest she became the first female country artist to sell over 1 million album copies. A single from the album, “Here You Come Again,” won Parton her first Grammy Award.
After Hollywood came calling, Parton’s film debut, 9 to 5, earned her two Golden Globe nominations, plus an Oscar nomination for the title song, which she wrote and sang.
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Parton was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1999 and joined the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1986, and the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2001. She was honored with the National Medal of Arts in 2005 and was a Kennedy Center Honors recipient the following year.
Parton’s husband, Carl Dean, whom she married in 1966, passed away at age 82 in early 2025.