Dolly Parton : "The Smoky Mountain Songbird"

Dolly Rebecca Parton was born on January 19, 1946 in Sevier County, Tennessee, in the United States of America, the 4th of 12 children (her sisters Stella and Rachel Ann are both country singers and actresses). Her father, Robert Lee Parton Sr., worked as a construction worker, mountain guide and sharecropper before earning himself a plot of land. Her mother, Avie Lee Caroline Parton (née Owens), was a homemaker (she was the daughter of a Pentecostal preacher).

In the mid-1960s, Parton used unusual studio recording techniques to create a one-girl, girl group sound redolent of Phil Spector's line-up. Songs like 'Busy Signal' and 'Control Yourself' are now designated as curios in the career of a country artist who's gone on to establish her own sound, but they do demonstrate how she was always ready and willing to branch out and explore different creative avenues.

Traditional country was a musical form that offered opportunities to female artists coming from communities where poverty was high and literacy rates were low. It was arrogantly assumed by some male stakeholders and business executives that these girls and women could be tightly controlled, but this assumption was wrong, as history had already indicated. Elsie McWilliams, Cindy Walker and hitmaker Marijohn Wilkin are in the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame for a reason.

Jenny Lou Carson was a prolific songwriter who's now acknowledged as being the first woman to write a No.1 country music hit. Liz Anderson enjoyed a lengthy career as a professional songwriter, producing hits for other artists, before emerging as a recording artist in her own right in the mid-1960s. Friends Loretta Lynn and Dottie West knocked down walls in the 1960s; West initially wrote songs with steel guitarist Bill West, while Lynn snuck songs she'd written on to her albums, here and there. By 1967, Bobbie Gentry had emerged as a singer-songwriter of standing.

Dolly Parton was writing and recording singles as early as 1959 when she co-wrote the song 'Puppy Love' with her uncle, country musician Bill Owens. She explored a myriad of musical styles as a teenage performer, few of which performed particularly well on the commercial market, but this didn't derail her stated ambition to become a professional musician and songwriter. During this time, Parton looked up to Brenda Lee who she viewed as a great performer and who had legs as short as hers.

Parton finally secured backing to go it alone as the 'Summer of Love' came around, releasing her now-iconic, introductory country cut, 'Hello, I'm Dolly' (1967). Truth is, Parton was already a creative entertainer by this point and she's never stopped writing music and lyrics since. In the process, she's become acknowledged as a trailblazer for every female singer-songwriter who's entered country music within the modern rock 'n' roll era.

"I think the atmosphere in which Dolly Parton could be dismissed due to her appearance, her background, her gender and her genre has only just properly disappeared. In the 90s, when I learned to love music, you could enjoy a Dolly song but only with a large serve of irony. Every one of Dolly's hits was a one off - I'm still astonished at how many of her songs I know and love - because she was always a lightweight. It still requires a conscious effort for many of us, but now people are finally trying to enjoy art on its own terms. And when they do they find that Dolly writes perfectly contained stories about immediately relatable characters with an economy that I think is unmatched in pop music."

Dolly Parton was inducted into the Grand Ole Opry in 1969 which she said was a dream come true for her. Since 1970 she's received 49 nominations at the Grammy Awards, the second highest number for any country artist after Willie Nelson with 52. She's also been nominated at the Academy Awards, the Emmy Awards, the Golden Globe Awards, the Tony Awards and the Drama Desk Awards though she's never yet picked up an award at any of them. She was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for her music in 1984, located at 6712 Hollywood Boulevard in Hollywood, California; she received a joint star, in conjunction with regular collaborators Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstadt, for their work as the musical and archivist collective Trio in 2018. A seasoned harmony singer and multi-instrumentalist, Parton is the composer of over 3000 songs and counting.

Parton was awarded the Living Legend Medal by the U.S. Library of Congress on April 14, 2004, for her contributions to the cultural heritage of the United States. In 2005, she was honored with the National Medal of Arts, the highest honour given by the U.S. government for excellence in the arts. She received the Kennedy Center Honors from the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, for a lifetime of contributions to the arts, in 2006. In 2015, a newly discovered species of fungus found growing in the southern Appalachians was named Japewiella dollypartoniana in honor of Parton's music and her efforts to bring employment, education and global attention to that region.