Weeks after Dolly Parton’s death at 80 on Aug. 25, the tributes are still rolling in, not just from country radio, but from hip-hop playlists and R&B retrospectives too.
It’s a fitting spread for a songwriter whose catalog built one of the deepest, most cross-genre relationships with Black music of any artist in her genre. Parton wrote more than 5,000 songs over her six-decade career, dozens of which found new life in the hands of Black artists across R&B, hip-hop, and gospel.
That connection, often left out of the tributes to her legacy, shows up in chart-topping covers, quiet investments, and moments of advocacy long before they were common in her industry.
Here are six ways her legacy touched the Black community.
She turned Whitney Houston’s cover into an investment in Black Nashville
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JWTaaS7LdU
When Whitney Houston recorded I Will Always Love You for the 1992 film The Bodyguard, the ballad spent 14 weeks at the top of the Billboard Hot 100, becoming one of the best-selling singles in music history.
Parton, who wrote the song in 1973 as a farewell to mentor Porter Wagoner, earned an estimated $10 million in royalties from Houston’s version, according to Forbes. Parton later told Watch What Happens Live that she used the windfall to buy an office complex in a historically Black neighborhood in Nashville near 16th Avenue.
She backed Beyoncé’s Jolene reimagining
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9XHMK3nWr4
Beyoncé’s 2024 album Cowboy Carter reworked Parton’s 1973 hit Jolene into a fiercer, more assertive warning aimed at a homewrecker. Even though the lyrics changed dramatically, streaming credits list Parton as the song’s sole songwriter, meaning royalties from the cover flow back to her. Parton also recorded a spoken-word intro track, Dolly P, welcoming Miss Honey B onto the album, and later called the reinterpretation “very bold.” The album also spotlighted Black country trailblazer Linda Martell.
Her Islands in the Stream became a Grammy-nominated hip-hop hit
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ro6q1SeYHTg
Parton’s 1983 duet with Kenny Rogers, Islands in the Stream, resurfaced in 1998 when rapper Pras interpolated its melody into Ghetto Supastar (That Is What You Are), featuring Ol’ Dirty Bastard and Mýa. Ol’ Dirty Bastard reportedly wandered into the recording session by accident and recorded his verse on the spot. Made for the film Bulworth, the song earned a Grammy nomination for best rap performance by a duo or group, introducing Parton’s songwriting to a new, younger audience far outside country radio.
She dropped Dixie from her dinner show years ahead of the industry
In 2018, two years before groups such as the Chicks and Lady A renamed themselves amid the Black Lives Matter protests, Parton quietly renamed her Dixie Stampede dinner attraction Dolly Parton’s Stampede, citing the word’s ties to the Confederacy. “As soon as you realize that something is a problem, you should fix it,” she told Billboard in 2020, when she also said plainly, “Of course Black lives matter.”
Hip-hop producers kept sampling her music decades later
Beyond Ghetto Supastar, Parton’s catalog resurfaced repeatedly in hip-hop long after she left the pop charts. The Oakland duo Blackalicious sampled the piano intro of her 1980 hit 9 to 5 for their 2002 track Release, featuring Zack de la Rocha, Saul Williams, and Lyrics Born. It’s one of dozens of examples of Parton’s songwriting reaching audiences she likely never set out to court.
She gave Black artists a national stage on her variety shows
Long before crossover collaborations were common, Parton hosted two network shows, a syndicated series in 1976 and an hour-long ABC show in 1987, and used both to put Black performers in front of a mostly white, country-leaning audience. The 1976 show’s guests included Marilyn McCoo and Billy Davis Jr., the Fifth Dimension, and the Hues Corporation.
The 1987 series featured Patti LaBelle, the Neville Brothers, and a joint episode with Smokey Robinson and the Temptations, who joined Parton for a My Girl /My Guy medley. Parton and Robinson also recorded their own duet, I Know You by Heart, around the same time. Parton’s catalog made her one of the most covered and sampled songwriters in American history.