Music Legend Dolly Parton is dead at 80
Bryan Seaver, Parton's nephew and her head of security for more than two decades, said she died peacefully Tuesday in Nashville.
Then he passed along a request she had left with him. "Dolly called me and said she wants to rest in a beautiful bed of plush cotton because after a life wearing heavy rhinestones, she finally deserves to be comfortable and have some rest."
Five days before she died, Parton said publicly that she had been dealing with health issues she "didn't pay attention to when I was watching over Carl," her husband Carl Dean, who died in March 2025 after 58 years of marriage. Earlier this month she pulled out of a Dollywood appearance, saying her Nashville doctor had "kinda clipped my wings."
In 2023, as Tennessee lawmakers pushed through a stack of anti-trans laws and tried to ban drag performances in public, Parton said trans people cannot help being trans "any more than I can help being Dolly Parton." "I just want everybody to be treated good," she said. To the Christians who came after her for it, she had already answered: "If you're the fine Christian that you think you are, why are you judging people? That's God's job."
When Austin drag performer Brigitte Bandit spent that same year fighting Texas's anti-drag law in court, in full drag, Parton sent her a signed, bejeweled guitar.
In April 2020 she gave $1 million to coronavirus research at Vanderbilt. Dr. Naji Abumrad, the friend who told her what the lab was working on, said her money made the research go "10 times faster." She took the Moderna shot on camera and told the holdouts not to be "such a chicken squat."
Her Imagination Library has mailed more than 300 million free books to children. She built it for her father, Robert Lee Parton, who could not read or write.
"He got to live long enough to hear the kids call me the Book Lady."
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