Dolly Parton – the rhinestone-loving, self-proclaimed “cheap” country queen who left an indelible mark on country music with hits like “Jolene” and “Coat of Many Colors” – has died. She was 80 years old. 

Dolly, who raised herself from the backwoods of Tennessee into the hearts of Americans of all social and political stripes, passed “peacefully” Tuesday while surrounded by loved ones, her heartbroken family announced.

She made hundreds of millions off her music and Hollywood career, but gave as good as she got — funding the Dollywood amusement park in her home county to bring in tourist dollars and jobs, donating more than 300 million books to kids all over the world, and funding critical medical research — including one of the first COVID-19 vaccines. 

“My family and I have shared a lifetime of beautiful memories with Dolly, but so have you,” Dolly’s nephew, Bryan Seaver, said in the moving message posted across social media.

“She has always been on your television, your record player, your CD and on your phone playlist, becoming an extended part of your family whether you liked it or not,” he added.

Seaver’s message captured Dolly well — for seven decades her huge and trilling voice, along with her enormous hairdos and bodacious assets, were constants across radio and television with chart-topping tunes like “I Will Always Love You” — covered to even greater success by Whitney Houston — and blockbuster movies like “9 to 5.”

Dolly was also a rare icon who avoided the pitfalls of fame across a blazing career, instead building a devoted following from all walks of life with an attitude of love and humor towards the world around her.

Exactly what the country crooner died of remains unclear, but she was reportedly admitted on Friday to Nashville’s Vanderbilt University Medical Center for autoimmune and kidney problems, TMZ reported.

Dolly also told PEOPLE the same day that she was “dealing with some health issues,” something she repeated in various interviews over the last year after suddenly cancelling several appearances and performances.

She then passed at her home outside Nashville on Tuesday morning.

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Those health issues appeared to arise following the March 2025 death of her husband of nearly 60 years, Carl Dean — with Dolly saying in recent months that she hadn’t given her own health adequate attention while caring for him.

But Seaver assured Dolly’s fans that she met death with the same bright attitude she followed in life – sharing how she called him to say she was ready to “rest in a beautiful bed of plush cotton” after “a life wearing heavy rhinestones.”  

“The sadness lays with us, not with Dolly,” Seaver said. “Dolly has lived in the light and is in the arms of Jesus, surely met by Carl, her parents and countless others.”

“Dolly also opened doors for generations of singers, songwriters, musicians and dreamers from every walk of life and across every continent,” he added. “By her example we believed that anything was possible. She never saw a door she couldn’t open, and the doors she opened made and changed history.”

That history started in a one-room cabin in the Appalachian countryside east of Knoxville, where Dolly was born in 1946 among 12 children of farming parents.

The huge family scraped by “dirt poor” and without running water, Dolly would tell, but their home was always filled with the music her parents played on the instruments they taught their kids.

Her mother particularly kindled Dolly’s burgeoning talent, encouraging her to write songs at age 5.

That’s how old Dolly was when she wrote her first — “Little Tiny Tassel Top” – and by 10 years old she was singing and playing guitar on local radio shows, and at just 13 she appeared for the first time on the legendary live Grand Ole Opry radio show in Nashville.

The Opry is where she met the likes of Johnny Cash and Porter Wagoner, two of country music’s biggest stars who helped launch her career when she moved to Nashville after high school.

She ended up singing regularly alongside Wagoner on “The Porter Wagoner Show,” with her flashy looks and one-of-a-kind voice turning her into a household name for viewers of the nationally syndicated variety show.

Dolly and Porter’s dueting voices even ended up singing on the moon — with the pair belting their hearts out in a series of recordings for Apollo 16’s country-loving astronaut Charlie Duke, who took the tapes along for his 1972 journey across deep space.

But Dolly wasn’t satisfied to be a side-act for the superstar Wagoner – she had visions of a solo career, and wrote him the song “I Will Always Love You” to explain why she needed to break up their musical duo.

“I went home and wrote that song, took it back the next morning, and said, ‘Sit down, I need you to hear something.’ So I sang it, and he was crying,” Dolly told the Bobby Bones show in 2017.

Armed with that song Dolly poured herself into her solo work and scored a massive hit with her next album, “Jolene,” with its singles topping the charts.

Despite those successes Dolly drove herself hard — sometimes sleeping in cars and bathing in gas station sinks as she raced across the country from gig to gig for her growing fanbase.

“My bedroom was the backseat,” Dolly said during a 2018 appearance on “Shine on With Reese.” “I’d wash my hair in the filling station bathrooms and put makeup on in the side mirror of the car, and that was just how you did it.”

By 1980 she’d become a bona fide American mega-star, with her bouffant hair and gaudy makeup pairing perfectly with the beaming smile she wore at every appearance.

“It costs a lot of money to look this cheap,” Dolly would famously joke, even once saying she modeled her looks on “the town tramp” when she was growing up.

It was 1980 when she made her first leap to the big screen, appearing alongside Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin in “9 to 5” – which she wrote the hit theme song for – a comedy about jilted secretaries who plot vengeance on their sexist boss.

The movie was a smash success and helped turn Dolly into an icon for working women, a role solidified when she appeared in 1989’s “Steel Magnolias” as one of a group of fiercely independent women.

Being a role model for those in need soon became one of the things Dolly was best at and most known for.

In 1995 she founded the Imagination Library, a charity which has donated more than 300 million books to young children over the years.

She also opened the Dollywood amusement park down the road from her hometown, with the attraction becoming the largest employer in the surrounding Sevier County and pumping at least $1.8 billion into the local economy annually.

And she always managed to stay effortlessly relevant, notably pairing up with young popstars like her goddaughter Miley Cyrus over the years and Sabrina Carpenter in 2024.

Her awards – 11 Grammys, an Emmy, and honors from the Kennedy Center and the National Medal of Arts – are footnotes on her sprawling career, one which touched the hearts of people everywhere.

“Dolly was a farmer just like her daddy,” Dolly’s family said in their statement. “He farmed the soil, she farmed songs and happiness.”