Dolly Parton

Time -  Dolly Parton, the beloved country-music superstar known for writing about the lives of regular people in more than 3,000 songs and, in later years, for giving away more than 300 million books to children around the world, has died in Nashville. She was 80. Parton had recently shared updates about health issues she’d been dealing with since the death of her husband Carl Dean last year, and her representatives told People that her death in Nashville came after a “brief battle with cancer.” Her nephew and bodyguard Bryan Seaver announced her death in an Instagram video posted to her account on Aug. 25, saying, “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.”

To her fans around the world, she was Saint Dolly—the American godmother who channeled the sorrows of everyday life into song, wrapping ugly truths in pretty packages. Though she was described by music journalist Robert Oermann as “the Mozart of our times,” Parton’s larger-than-life hair, excess in rhinestones, surgical implants, and cosmetic work concealed the iron will through which she confronted the day’s realities with her craft. Most importantly, she wrote and sang with a woman’s voice and heart about topics that uniquely touched her gender. Her songs include stories of stillborn births (“Down From Dover”), suicide (“The Bridge”), shame (“Just Because I’m a Woman”), abuse (“A Gamble Either Way”), adoption (“Doing This for Your Sake”), isolation (“Two Doors Down”), mental institutions (“Daddy Come and Get Me”), and prostitution (“The Bargain Store”).

Parton was a genius from humble origins. Because of them, she remained vulnerable, even relatable, in the public eye. Many wealthy folk prefer to be compassionate from on-high, if at all, never getting their feet wet or hands dirty. Parton rolled in the mud. She claimed she modeled her look on “the town trash whore,” whom she thought was “beautiful.” She dressed in a way that was her idea of glamour: yellow hair piled atop her head, bright red lipstick and nails, high-heeled shoes, and a tight skirt. “I thought [that woman] was the prettiest thing I’d ever seen,” she once said on Ellen. “So I grew up to look just like her!” More