January 19th, 2007 - Happy Birthday

Her family was, as she described them, "dirt poor", and lived in a rustic, dilapidated one-room cabin in the Great Smoky Mountains, near Locust Ridge. Parton's parents were parishioners in the Assembly of God Church, a Pentecostal denomination, and music was a very large part of her church experience. She once told an interviewer that her grandfather was a Pentecostal "holy roller" preacher and today, when appearing in live concerts, she frequently performs spiritual songs. (Parton, however, professes no denomination, claiming only to be Christian while adding that she believes that all Earth's peoples are God's children.)

On May 30, 1966, at the age of 20, she married Carl Dean (whom she met upon her first day in Nashville at the Wishy-Washy Laundromat two years earlier), who ran an asphalt-paving business in Ringgold, Georgia. She has remained with Dean, who has always shunned publicity and rarely accompanies her to any events.

Since the mid-1980s Parton has been praised for her many charitable efforts, particularly in the area of literacy. Her literacy program, Dolly Parton's Imagination Library, which mails one book per month to children, from the time of their birth until they enter kindergarten, began in Sevier Country, Tennessee, but has now been replicated in 566 counties across thirty-six U.S. states, as well as Canada. It has resulted in Parton's receiving the Association of American Publishers' AAP Honors in 2000, Good Housekeeping's Seal of Approval in 2001 (the first time the seal had been given to a person), the American Association of School Administrators' Galaxy Award in 2002, the Chasing Rainbows Award from the National State Teachers of the Year in 2002, and the Child and Family Advocacy Award from the Parents As Teachers National Center in 2003. The program distributes more than 2.5 million free books to children annually.

Her Dollywood theme park has also been noted for bringing jobs and tax revenues to a previously depressed region.

Her efforts to preserve the bald eagle through the American Eagle Foundation's sanctuary at Dollywood earned her the Partnership Award from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 2003.

She has also worked to raise money on behalf of several other causes, including the Red Cross and a number of HIV/AIDS-related charities.

In December 2006, Parton pledged $500,000 toward a proposed $90 million hospital and cancer center to be constructed in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, in the name of Dr. Robert F. Thomas, the physician who delivered her; she also announced plans for a benefit concert to raise additional funds for the project.

• The first cloned mammal was a sheep named "Dolly" in honor of Dolly Parton, because it was cloned from a mammary cell.
• As the writer Tony Barrell has pointed out (London Sunday Times, January 8, 2006), Parton was born on the same day as the eminent British novelist Julian Barnes, and both stars have theme park connections. Parton, of course, has Dollywood, and Barnes's 1998 novel, England, England, is about an entrepreneur re-creating England as a theme park on the Isle of Wight.
• In a live recording of "We've got tonight" with Kenny Rogers, she swaps the lyrics "who needs tomorrow" with "who needs Sheena Easton" (who originally sang the duet with Rogers).
• In a Celebrity Jeopardy! sketch on Saturday Night Live, Darrell Hammond, portraying Sean Connery, answers "Dolly Parton!" in the category "Famous Titles," which he thinks is "Famous Titties."
• She once said: "I'm not offended by all of the dumb-blonde jokes because I know I'm not dumb--and I'm also not blonde."
• Told guest host Jay Leno, during an appearance on The Tonight Show in 1989, that her mother was one of ten children and her father one of fifteen children.
• In 2006, she was named Honorary Citizen of Piteå, a city in northern Sweden.