Dolly Parton

Dolly Rebecca Parton (born January 19, 1946) is an American singer-songwriter, author, multi-instrumentalist, actress and philanthropist, best-known for her work in country music. In the four-and-a-half decades since her national-chart début, she remains one of the most-successful female artists in the history of the country genre which garnered her the title of 'The Queen of Country Music', with twenty-five number-one singles, and a record forty-one top-10 country albums. She has the distinction of having performed on a top-five country hit in each of the last five decades and is tied with Reba McEntire as the only country artists with No. 1 singles in four consecutive decades. She is known for her distinctive soprano, sometimes bawdy humor, flamboyant dress sense and voluptuous figure. Childhood Dolly Parton was born in Sevierville, Tennessee, the fourth of twelve children born: Her family was, as she described them, "dirt poor". She described her family's shortness of money in a number of her early songs, notably "Coat of Many Colors" which happens to be her favorite, still today, to sing over all of her others, and "In the Good Old Days (When Times Were Bad)". They lived in a rustic, dilapidated one-room cabin in Locust Ridge, Tennessee, a hamlet just north of the Greenbrier Valley in the Great Smoky Mountains of Sevier County, a predominantly Pentecostal area. Music formed a major part of her early church experience. She once told an interviewer that her grandfather was a Pentecostal "holy-roller" preacher.Today, when appearing in live concerts, she frequently performs spiritual songs.