If you're a longtime BuzzFeed reader, you know that Dolly Parton was one of our absolute favorite celebrities to write about, and why not? She was a gem of a person and an incredible talent. Personally, as an older guy (I'm 50, don't tell anyone), Dolly has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. I even went to see 9 to 5 in theaters with my parents as a 5-year-old, and left singing "Working nine to five!" 🎶
I was even alone in a room with Dolly once! There used to be a popular Mexican restaurant in Los Angeles called El Chavo which was famous for its tribute to Dolly, including a large photo of her behind the bar. One afternoon, my wife and I stopped in for lunch with our baby daughter, and there was only one other couple there — Dolly and her husband! And guess where she was sitting? That's right! Just in front of her photo. (I'm guessing someone told her about it and she just had to check it out.) My wife and I debated whether to say hello. My wife even joked we should bring our baby over so "Saint Dolly" could bless her, but in the end we decided to leave them alone. Hearing Dolly's mellifluous voice fill up the otherwise empty space was gift enough!
Anyway, for us to remember Dolly — and say thank you for all she did — here are 21 incredible facts and stories about the entertainment legend we covered over the years:
1.
First, we shared the experiences of people who actually met Dolly, like this one: "I met Dolly Parton twice while working at Dollywood. The first time we were in the park before the season started, and she was shooting commercials. When we got there that day, they had turned our shop into her dressing room, so we weren't allowed in at first. But when she found out, she let us in. There were buffet tables set up and she told us to help ourselves, and that she didn't need all of that food anyway! In between takes, she talked to us about what we were doing, where we were going to college, what we were studying, and so on."
2.
This person also shared a story about Dolly being genuinely as sweet as East Tennessee tea: "There was a story on here once about her that really stuck with me. A Reddit user was talking about meeting her with one of her friends, I think. They were taking some sort of picture, and the friend got up on top of something for the group picture. While she was climbing, she slipped and accidentally kicked Dolly. She was super embarrassed and kept apologizing, and Dolly just giggled and said something along the lines of, 'Well, now you can go around telling people you got to kick Dolly Parton's ass.' Lol. I thought that was cute and funny."
3.
And we wrote about another person Dolly was very generous to — LeGrand Gold, a man who had been battling colon cancer for two years and had made a bucket list that included meeting her. So she called him, thanked him for being a longtime fan, told him how much it meant to know her music had touched his life, and then sang a personalized bit of “I Will Always Love You” to him — a moment Gold said made him “feel like I’m immortal now.”
4.
Despite all of Dolly's kindness and positivity, her life wasn't all roses and hit records. One sad example: Dolly struggled with infertility because of endometriosis and had a hysterectomy in the early '80s that permanently prevented her from having children. Afterward, she suffered from depression and even contemplated suicide. “It was an awful time for me,” she told reporters in 2008.
Dolly said she always thought she'd have children, and although it never happened, she still thinks of herself as a mother. She's close to her nieces and nephews, and told Today, “I didn’t have children because I believed that God didn’t mean for me to have kids so everybody’s kids could be mine, so I could do things like Imagination Library." (The Imagination Library is a nonprofit program she founded that mails free, age-appropriate books every month to children from birth to age five.) “I would have been a great mother, I think. I would probably have given up everything else,” she told the Guardian. "I think a big part of my whole success is the fact that I was free to work.”
5.
OK, let's lighten things up with a hilarious joke she told on The Tonight Show: "Up in Pigeon Forge, many years ago, back when I was a kid, they had a bear in a cage. You know, we’re famous for the bears in the Smokies. And they had this bear in a big cage up there, and people would stop at this market and buy Cokes for this bear that was in the cage. And tourists would take pictures — for years, they would give it Cokes and peanuts."
"So anyway, this bear was just getting bigger and bigger. And they were selling all kinds of stuff at this market, and this poor bear was just drinking them all. One day, some redneck put gasoline in a Coke can. Can you believe that? How bad people are? The poor bear just went crazy, and it broke out of the pen and started toward Sevierville — because Pigeon Forge is about eight miles from Sevierville — and it was going all the way down there when all of a sudden, it just fell over."
6.
And while we're on the subject of Dolly and jokes, I have to share this exchange she had on her short-lived TV show, Dolly, back in 1988. When a teenager in the crowd asked her what advice she had for the teenagers of the day, she replied, "I would say, 'Act like it's raining every day and wear your rubbers.'"
7.
We shared this iconic photo of Dolly Parton dressed as a Playboy Bunny taken for the cover of the October 1978 issue of Playboy, and the story behind it — the costume was actually made by Keanu Reeves's mother, Patricia Taylor!
On The Drew Barrymore Show, Dolly said that Taylor made a lot of costumes for her, and that she remembered Keanu when he "was just a little boy." She went on to say that she saw him all the time, and that Keanu's mom would even bring him over to her house when they did fittings. She then said that years and years later, she heard a knock on her dressing room door at a show she was doing, and that when she opened it, it was Keanu — who was already a big celebrity at the time. Keanu said, "Do you remember me? I'm the little boy who used to sit at your feet while my mama was doing [your costumes]." She said she thought, Oh my God! because she knew Keanu had gone on to be an actor, but she didn't connect that it was him until that moment.
8.
Dolly Parton was also Miley Cyrus's godmother! Parton became close to Miley's father, Billy Ray Cyrus, after they worked together, and he later asked her to be Miley's godmother. Dolly appeared as Miley's "Aunt Dolly" on Hannah Montana, performed with her repeatedly, and continued to shower her with love over the years.
In a 2024 interview with W Magazine, Miley revealed the most heartfelt story about Dolly sending her a fax. "Dolly wrote to me to say, 'How much do I love you? As much as my heart can hold and as far as my arms can reach.' It gets me choked up. I just love her so much," Miley said. "Last Christmas, she gave me a whole mannequin, done in her proportions and wearing her outfit. It's so major."
9.
The wildest part of the Miley story, though? According to Ancestry.com, the singers are actually seventh cousins, once removed. According to the genealogy company, they share a mutual relative in John Brickey, who was born in Virginia in 1740 and lived in Blount County, Tennessee, until his death in 1806.
The news didn't come as much of a shock to Dolly, who said, "That's amazing, the ancestry that says I'm related to Miley, and I'm sure she'll get a kick out of that. But it doesn't surprise me because she does feel like family. I've always said she feels like a niece, or a child, or whatever, so that's a cool little thing."
10.
Now here's a cool fact about the song she had me singing as a 5-year-old, "9 to 5." She composed the song by tapping her acrylic nails while on set.
Parton reflected on writing the song on The Tonight Show in 2019, saying: "When I wrote this song, I used my acrylic nails on the set. I did because they make noise, and it kind of sounded like a typewriter to me. And I played it on the actual record — it says 'Nails by Dolly' on the album!"
11.
Speaking of her iconic songs, Dolly actually wrote what are arguably her two biggest songs — “Jolene” and “I Will Always Love You” — on what may have been the very same day! She said the songs were found back-to-back on the same cassette, and while she can’t swear they were written on the exact same day, they came from an intensely creative and emotional stretch of her life. Basically, Dolly was GOING THROUGH IT and somehow turned it into two all-time classics.
13.
During COVID, she also donated $1 million to Vanderbilt University Medical Center to fund scientific research that contributed to the development of the Moderna vaccine.
14.
She used her platform to support the Black Lives Matter movement, too, by saying: "Do we think our little white asses are the only ones that matter? No!"
15.
Whitney Houston's cover of Dolly's "I Will Always Love You" is one of the biggest recordings of all time, but it almost didn't happen. Whitney was originally supposed to sing a cover of Jimmy Ruffin's "What Becomes of the Brokenhearted" as the main theme song for The Bodyguard. However, they decided to switch the song after they found out that Paul Young was doing a cover of the song for the soundtrack to Fried Green Tomatoes. Kevin Costner then suggested to David Foster (who was producing The Bodyguard soundtrack) that it should be "I Will Always Love You."
It doesn't end there, though! They almost ended up doing a slightly different cover of "I Will Always Love You," since the only version Foster could find at his local record store was Linda Ronstadt's cover. But when Foster spoke with Dolly Parton about getting the rights to cover it, she said yes, but told him they needed to use her version because it included the "And I wish you joy and happiness" final verse.
16.
One more fact about that song — Dolly Parton refused to let Elvis Presley record a cover of it because his team demanded half the publishing rights in exchange for him doing it. This was a common practice for songs Elvis recorded. Dolly's friends told her she was being silly for passing up the chance to have the legendary singer record one of her songs, but she knew the song was too personal and valuable to give up ownership. Of course, her decision, though difficult, proved to be very smart after Whitney Houston's 1992 version became a massive, massive hit. Dolly has since said she was thrilled at the idea of Elvis singing it and cried when turning him down, but never regretted protecting her work.
17.
Dolly had a very kind and supportive response when Lil Nas X covered her "Jolene." The two later met, and she congratulated him in person on a job well done.
18.
Dolly Parton was always witty and charming, even while consistently pushing back against a series of pretty rude and sexist questions from Barbara Walters in a 1978 interview. When Barbara asked Dolly, "Is it all you?" — referring to her breasts — Dolly joked, "Well, I can't show you here on television," before quipping that if she didn't have them naturally she wouldn't hesitate to "make" them. Barbara then said, "You don’t have to look like this. You’re very beautiful. You don’t have to wear the blonde wigs. You don’t have to wear the extreme clothes. Right?" "No, it’s certainly a choice," Dolly responded. "I don’t like to be like everybody else. I’ve often made this statement: I would never stoop so low as to be fashionable. That’s the easiest thing in the world to do… I’m very real where it counts and that’s inside. … Show business is a money-making joke. And I just always like telling jokes."
19.
In addition to acting, Dolly also produced movies and TV shows, including Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
The show was produced by Sandollar Entertainment, a production company that Dolly cofounded with her friend and business partner Sandy Gallin (on the right), in 1986.
In fact, Sandollar had produced the original movie it was based on, so they owned the rights to it. Gail Berman, who was the then-president and CEO of Sandollar Television, always thought it would be a great TV series. Since Joss Whedon wrote the script to the film, Sandollar was contractually obligated to offer him the opportunity to helm the series. According to Berman, she and Whedon were on the same page about Buffy. Dolly and Sandy, as heads of the production company, eventually got involved as well and helped make the series happen.
Berman went on to be an executive producer on Buffy, as well as its spinoff Angel, and left Sandollar shortly thereafter to focus on the shows. After leaving, Berman had lunch with Dolly, where she complained that men at the company had denied her a fair share of the Buffy royalties. Dolly then handed her a check to cover what she was owed.
21.
And finally, let's close things out with a photo of Dolly at age 19 in 1965, looking beautiful, with VERY big hair and an incredible future ahead of her. Rest in peace, Dolly! We will always love you!
Спутники
РН
SpaceX
Роскосмос
NASA