How Dolly Parton’s business savvy helped her succeed far beyond the charts
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Not many musicians would snub a chance to work with Elvis Presley. But when Dolly Parton did so, it made her millions.
In 1974, after writing and recording I Will Always Love You, Parton was asked if Presley could cover the song. She turned him down after his manager demanded half the rights.
“Of course, I cried all night about that,” she later said of the ordeal in an interview.
But she wasn’t crying in 1992 when Whitney Houston’s power-ballad cover became a hit. Global sales of the song topped 20 million, earning Parton more than $10m in royalties, according to business magazine Forbes.
This is the less well-known side of Parton. While country music and films brought her fame, her entrepreneurial zeal brought her fortune.
The country icon signed deals, started companies, and invested in ideas that Forbes says built her a net worth of $450m by the time she died.
Business lessons from a young age
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 to school which her “mama” had knitted together.
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.
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Parton may have been motivated to make money right into her 80s, but she told the BBC in the 2017 interview that she never lost sight of where she came from.
“Being brought up poor means I don’t take things for granted, and no matter how much money I make, I’ll always count my blessings quicker and more often than I count my money.
She has “always realised the value of a dollar”, too.
“Even now if I go in a store it’s hard for me to pay a huge amount of money for one item. I say ‘good Lord’, what could mummy and daddy have done with that!”
Wealth was more than just a means to an end for Parton. It also allowed her to be generous.
She gave millions away to funding child literacy, providing wildfire relief, and creating a cure for Covid-19. In 2022, she was awarded the Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy for her charity work.
Talking about her many business and charity ideas in 2017, she told the BBC: “I just wish I was 30 years old so I could start over again and get all this stuff done… I’m gonna’ be working till I fall over bad.”
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Parton’s influence and success depended in part on her role as one of the few things on which Americans could agree.
Parton steadfastly refused to taint her beloved brand by weighing into politics, twice refusing the Presidential Medal of Freedom – having been offered it by Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
Maike Currie, vice president of personal finance at savings firm PensionBee, told the BBC’s Wake Up to Money that Parton set examples for others.
Fellow country music megastar Taylor Swift’s sound has been compared to Parton musically, but Currie said she may also have taken business inspiration there as well, deciding to rerecord her songs in order to own the rights to them.
Currie described Parton as a “brilliant businesswoman, but also an iconic investor and a real example to women about the power of what happens if women are financially independent”.
The star’s success tracks with the advice she took from her father, shared with the BBC in her 2017 interview: “He said: ‘Don’t let other people take advantage of you. You keep your mind on your business’.”
Additional reporting by Peter Hoskins, Will Harris and Stephen Ryan
