Parton wasn’t always wealthy. She grew up in poverty and in her 1971 hit Coat of Many Colours describes how she would wear rags which her “mama” had knitted together to school.
In a 2017 BBC interview, she said her father gave her business lessons from early in her career.
“My dad wasn’t an educated man, he wasn’t able to read and write, but my daddy had a great sense of business,” she told the BBC’s World Service in 2017.
“So when I got into the music business, I thought of it as a business. And so I started early on keeping my own songs and my own publishing company.”
While her publishing company helped build her wealth, Parton had plenty of other business ideas.
In 1985, she co-founded a film and TV production company called Sandollar Productions, which helped to make 90s cult thriller Buffy The Vampire Slayer.
Then there was Dollywood – the theme park in in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains in her home state of Tennessee, which she became co-owner of in 1986. It had changed owners multiple times since it was first set up 25 years earlier and her buy-in exponentially boosted visitor numbers.
She kept improving the park. In 2015, she opened the DreamMore Resort, a four-star hotel and spa down the road from Dollywood. Today, many of Parton’s family members work at the theme park and it is the biggest employer in its county.
She launched the Dolly Beauty cosmetics line in 2025 and she opened Dolly’s Tennessean Travel Stop in June this year. The shop offers a signature coffee brand named Cup of Ambition, a nod to her Grammy-winning single 9 to 5.
Paul Milliken, a reporter from Fox 5 Atlanta who had interviewed Parton many times, said diversification was the key to her business success.
“It’s a lesson that continues from her to this day to young artists,” he told BBC’s Wake Up to Money.
