Dolly Parton, songwriter and lifelong guitar player, dies at 80

Dolly Parton died on August 25 at the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center in Nashville, her family said in a statement posted to her Instagram. She was 80. Her representatives said she had been dealing with a brief cancer battle, and she had stepped back from public appearances through the late summer, citing dehydration and dizziness after her doctors told her not to travel.

Parton wrote on acoustic guitar from childhood in the east Tennessee mountains, and most of her early catalog started as strummed or fingerpicked parts before Nashville arrangers got to them. The guitar figure she came up with for "Jolene" is one of the most recognizable acoustic hooks in American music, even though the recorded version was played by session musicians. On stage she tended to favor small, light-bodied acoustics built to sit comfortably against her, and rhinestone-covered guitars became part of the look.

Across a career that ran seven decades she wrote something close to 3,000 songs, including "I Will Always Love You" and "9 to 5," built the Imagination Library children's book program, and funded medical research, including the Moderna vaccine effort. Tributes came in quickly from country, rock and pop artists alike.