Parton has also extended her appeal to a younger generation: She’s racked up 5.2 million followers on Twitter and 4.3 million on Instagram, where she went viral last year after sparking a meme.īorn in 1946 in a one-room cabin in rural Tennessee, Parton grew up watching her father hustle as a sharecropper, tobacco farmer and construction worker, and listening to her mother sing as she cared for her 12 children. Last month, she launched her first-ever perfume called “Scent from Above,” that’s complete with a bedazzled bottle. Her TV movie Dolly Parton's Heartstrings: These Old Bones was nominated for an Emmy Award in July 2020. In 2020, she released her first holiday album in 30 years and starred in the Netflix film Christmas on the Square. In 2019, she signed a deal with licensing company IMG to expand her brand into consumer products. It was one in a series of moves made by Parton, who has proved herself as talented a businesswoman as she is a singer-songwriter.Īt age 75, Parton remains as in demand as ever.

And while her music catalog makes up about a third of that, her largest asset is Dollywood, the theme park in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee that she cofounded 35 years ago.

It’s that kind of shrewd business mindset that has helped Parton build an estimated $350 million fortune. (In actuality, she didn’t buy Graceland, and instead invested some of the royalties from the song in a Black community in Nashville by purchasing an office complex there.) The song has made her very rich: “When Whitney came out, I made enough money to buy Graceland,” she told Country Music Television in 2006. Every time it is played on the radio, purchased as a cassette or used in a film, Parton receives a publishing fee. The deal was called off.Īlmost two decades later, Whitney Houston covered the song, with Parton holding on to those lucrative publishing rights. She wasn’t about to change that-even for the King. Ever since she started her own music publishing company in 1966, she had held onto nearly all of her publishing rights, which meant she got paid a bigger royalty whenever one of her songs is played or covered.

But there was a catch: Presley’s manager insisted that she sign over half the publishing rights.

Worth it song