Remembering Dolly Parton: The Queen of Country, 1946–2026

Dolly Parton died on 25 August 2026, surrounded by loved ones at the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center in Nashville, after a brief battle with cancer. She was 80. Her passing comes just 17 months after the death of her husband of nearly 60 years, Carl Dean, in March 2025 — a loss she spoke about with characteristic candour in the time since.

It is hard to overstate what Dolly Parton meant to the world, and harder still to sum it up in a single register. She was one of the most prolific songwriters of the 20th century — "Jolene" and "I Will Always Love You" written, by her own account, on the same night — and one of the best-selling artists in the history of recorded music. She was a shrewd businesswoman who built an empire from a Tennessee mountain childhood of genuine poverty, all while cultivating a public persona so warm, so funny, and so unfailingly generous that "icon" barely covers it.

Her humanitarian work will outlast the hits, if that's possible. The Dollywood Foundation's Imagination Library has mailed more than 250 million free books to children around the world since 1995, built entirely on the belief — hers — that every child deserves a book of their own. She funded vaccine research, disaster relief, and her own hometown's economy for decades, usually without asking for credit.

She had a gift, too, for saying something true in a single sentence. "Find out who you are and do it on purpose," she wrote in Behind the Seams: My Life in Rhinestones — a line that has outlived plenty of longer, more self-serious attempts at the same idea.

Brisbane, like everywhere else, has its own relationship with her songbook. Brooke McMullen's touring tribute show, DOLLY: I Will Always Love You, has played venues around the city and southeast Queensland — including The Old Museum and Redcliffe — and continues to tour into 2027; details and dates are on Brooke McMullen's official site. For anyone who wants to spend an afternoon in the spirit of what she actually built, rather than just what she sang, the Imagination Library's ethos lives on locally too, in the shelves of the State Library of Queensland at South Bank and independent shops like Avid Reader in West End.

Photos: Shawn Miller/Library of Congress (public domain); Kristopher Harris, 2014 (CC BY 2.0); Alan Light, 1983 (CC BY 2.0); Curtis Hilbun, 2010 (CC BY 3.0).

Rest easy, Dolly. Thank you for all of it.