Dolly Parton met Carl Dean outside a Nashville laundromat in 1964. For decades, she was as protective of her marriage as he was fiercely private.

For many Americans, Ms. Parton represented an idealized style of faith: one centered in small rural congregations that prize community over ideology.

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This is what she did for the written word. And medicine. And …

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Dolly Parton was utterly real about her unrealness. She played with the over-the-top details.

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A surging online push to rename Nashville International Airport for the beloved Tennessean superstar could get snagged in bureaucracy and politics.

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In 1980, feminists were often stereotyped as man-hating or out of touch. Then Parton gave the movement a boost — and an anthem.

Bipartisan tributes demonstrated the success of the singer’s long-running effort to stay out of party politics in a sharply divided country.

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Even Machiavelli wouldn’t like Trump’s doings.

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She didn’t see herself as a saint; she identified as something we needed even more: a writer.

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Tributes continued to pour in for Dolly Parton a day after her death. Singer-songwriter Martina McBride, named female vocalist of the year four times by the Country Music Association and three times by the Academy of Country Music, joined Amna Nawaz to discuss her friend and fellow icon.

The country star supported early childhood literacy, disaster relief, the development of the Covid-19 vaccine and more.

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Dolly Parton was more than a musician, actor, author, philanthropist, or theme-park entrepreneur. Parton, who died Tuesday at age 80, occupied a space in our global cultural imagination — a figure of American mythology, someone best described as larger-than-life and then a little bit more. But from the very beginning, at the heart of everything she accomplished, she was a songwriter.

Dolly Parton, the country music icon whose soaring vibrato vocals, poignant songwriting and sparkling costumes defined her rise from a log cabin in the Tennessee mountains to the height of stardom and acclaim, has died.