Dolly Parton, beloved US country music icon, dies at 80

Dolly Parton, a United States country music icon who won the adoration of fans around the world with her compelling songwriting and vibrant personality, has died at the age of 80.

Parton’s publicist said in a statement on Tuesday that the famed musician had passed away peacefully in Nashville, Tennessee.

“Dolly has lived in the light, and is in the arms of Jesus, surely met by Carl, her parents, and countless others who have watched her and longed for her to meet them in the heavens,” her nephew Bryan Seaver said in a video posted on Parton’s Instagram account.

“Dolly also opened doors for generations of singers, songwriters, musicians, and dreamers from every walk of life and across every continent. 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,” he added.

Throughout her career, Parton wrote hundreds of songs, including classics such as “Jolene”, “9 to 5”, and Coat of Many Colours”, and won a degree of acclaim and public affection that few artists in the modern era have been able to match.

With enormous blonde wigs, sparkling outfits and a self-deprecating wit, Parton became one of the best-known country music artists in the US, rising to the heights of stardom from her humble beginnings in a log cabin in the southern US state of Tennessee.

She gave her first musical performances in church, where her grandfather was a preacher, and appeared at the age of 13 at the storied country music venue the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, where she was introduced by Johnny Cash as “a little girl here from up in East Tennessee”.

Raised as one of 12 children by a father who had quit school to work on a farm and struggled with reading, she later started an education nonprofit called Imagination Library that sent free books to children across the state.