Dolly Parton’s cup was overflowing with ambition.
While the legendary country singer left an incredible legacy of music and social impact in the wake of her death, she and herlate husbandCarl Deandidn’t have any children throughout their nearly six-decade marriage.
And though Partonbattled endometriosisand had a partial hysterectomy in her 30s, she never saw having kids as a top priority throughout her life.
“When you’re a young couple, you think you’re going to have kids, but it just wasn’t one of those burning things for me,” she told<a href="https://www.saga.co.uk/magazine/entertainment/dolly-parton-if-something-is-bagging-or-sagging-or-dragging-ill-tuck-it-suck-it-or-pluck-it?srsltid=AfmBOopkQJVZtId0sfm9uamSZhx4JA-GcCv9OuqKRivDSEMBFHgDnqYz” rel=”nofollow noopener” target=”_blank”>Sagamagazine in 2023. “I had my career and my music, and I was traveling.”
As the “Jolene” singer put it, “If I’d had kids, I’d have stayed home with them, I’m sure, and worried myself to death about them.”
While she was godmother toMiley Cyrus, Parton felt that not having kids of her own allowed her to shower other people in her life with blessings, all the way up until her Aug. 25 death at age 80due to cancer.
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Dolly Parton Will Be Buried Next to Late Husband Carl Dean
“The older [Carl and I] get, the gladder we are that we don’t have [kids] now, because we take care of a lot of other people’s kids,” she toldRolling Stonein 2003. “We buy new cars for all the nieces and nephews that graduate, we send any to college that want to go.”
Throughout her life, Parton released 49 solo studio albums, earned 11 Grammys, received an honorary Oscar, starred in countless TV shows and movies and started multiple businesses, including her renowned Dollywood theme park in Tennessee—a career she had said was only possible because of not having kids.
“Since I had no kids, and my husband was pretty independent, I had freedom,” she toldOprah Winfreyon a 2020 episode of her Apple TV seriesThe Oprah Conversation. “So I think a big part of my whole success is the fact that I was free to work.”
Plus, Parton’s personal favorite legacy was her Imagination Library, which has provided over 300 million free books to kids.
“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,” she continued to Oprah, “because if I hadn’t had the freedom to work, I wouldn’t have done all the things I’ve done. I wouldn’t be in a position to do all of the things I’m doing now.”
To learn more details about Parton from throughout her life, keep reading…
Pete Still/Redferns
2. A hustler from the start, Parton’s dad famously paid the doctor who helped deliver her—the fourth of 12 children—with a bag of cornmeal.
3. The singer learned to make do early on. With no running water, they’d bathe in the river during summer months and “in the winter time, we just had a pan of water and we’d wash down as far as possible, and we’d wash up as far as possible,” she told Playboy in 1978. “Then, when somebody cleared the room, we’d wash ‘possible.’ That’s the way it was.”
“It was really hot,” costar Shirley MacLaine recounted to Garden & Gun in 2017. “There was Dolly with a waist cincher no more than sixteen inches around and heels about two feet high and a wig that must have weighed twenty-three pounds. And she’s the only one who didn’t sweat. She never complained about anything. Never. The rest of us were always complaining.”
6. The day after Parton became the first member of her family to graduate high school in 1964, she moved to Nashville.
8. Choosing to live almost entirely outside of his wife’s limelight, Dean was rarely spotted at public events before his 2025 death. And he’s only caught a handful of Parton’s performances.
“He gets nervous,” Parton told Ellen DeGeneres in 2011. “It’s almost like seeing your kid in a recital. He’s afraid I’ll mess up.”
But, yes, he would always love her. “He’s always been supportive,” she noted. “He’s like a brother and a father and a friend and a husband and a lover—all of those things to me.”
“I’m just saying, anything new gets old,” Parton told E! News at the 2024 opening of Dollywood’s new “The Dolly Parton Experience” in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. “And I think if you just kind of stay together so much, you just nitpick every little thing and notice all that.”
Leaning into the absence-makes-the-heart-grow-fonder adage has “worked for us,” she added, “because we both do different things and it’s exciting when we are together. So the fact that there’s some little space that makes it exciting when you go home.”
12. Among her chosen brood: Miley Cyrus, Parton serving as her godmother onscreen in Hannah Montana and IRL. So the country legend wasn’t shocked when she discovered they shared a mutual great grandfather named John Brickley.
“Well, we’re so close, Miley and I,” Parton noted to Access Hollywood in 2024, “I thought we would have been at least third cousins, ten times removed.”
Plus, she reasoned, “I don’t want to go to bed looking like a hag with Carl.”
14. And beneath her blinged out clothes, she was fully dolled up, confirming a long whispered-about rumor to E! News in 2017.
“I have a tendency to scar easy and I’m so fair-skinned that I stay purple around where I’ve had a scar, so I started having little pastel tattoos, little butterflies or little things to just cover scars,” she explained. “I don’t look like a biker chick or nothing, but if I was younger and could ride a bike, I might. All of mine are pastels. They’re just scattered here and there, where I need them, but they’re not the kind of thing to show on television usually. I can’t get naked, can I?”
Without many essentials on hand, she used a burnt match tip to line her eyes and stained her lips with pokeberries.
16. Once she had the means, Parton was a strong advocate for plastic surgery. “I don’t really think about it too much,” she told The Guardian in 2011. “If something is sagging, bagging, or dragging, I’ll tuck it, suck it or pluck it.”
“We never saw her,” Sarah Michelle Gellar explained in 2023. “We’d get Christmas gifts in the beginning that would have our name, and I would think, ‘She doesn’t know who I am.'” But, as it turned out, Parton was well aware Gellar was kicking butt as the titular slayer.
“One day, somebody asked her about it and she complimented the show and my performance,” Gellar noted. “I was like, ‘Oh, I can die now. Dolly Parton knows who I am and thinks I’m good.'”
18. Sandollar Productions, which Parton formed with producing partner Sandy Gallin, also produced the Buffy spinoff Angel, plus films like 1991’s Father of the Bride, 1995’s Sabrina and 1996’s Fly Away Home.
Her preferred mode of communication is a bit of a throwback. “You don’t call Dolly, you fax her,” Reba McEntire shared on Apple Music’s Southern Accents Radio in 2022. “That’s the only way I know to get ahold of her. I even asked Kenny Rogers one time, I said, ‘Do you have Dolly’s cell number?’ He said, ‘No.’ So you fax her.”
“I couldn’t do it because of other things, or I just didn’t think I was big enough to do it,” she explained. “When you think about those shows, those are big, big productions. I’ve never done anything with that big of a production. I don’t know if I could have.”
21. As if there was any doubt that fans would continue to think of Parton every step of the way, she cemented her legacy by writing a song that will be stored in a Dollywood time capsule until January 2045—what would have been her 99th birthday.
“I had to write this song that nobody was going to hear ‘til then, and I tell you you have no idea how that has bothered me,” she shared on the The Kelly Clarkson Show in 2022. “I want to go dig that up so bad.”
Still, she hopes it serves as a reminder to fans that she will always love them.
“Hopefully it’ll be special,” she added. “I have to honestly say, it was an odd feeling to be asked to write a song that was not going to be heard ‘til [2045]. But it’s a good song.”
