Dolly Parton Has Led A Tragic Life
After a decade-spanning career, Dolly Parton has seen a fair share of her contemporaries pass away. The loss of country singer Porter Wagoner, who helped kick start her career, was particularly hard. She even penned 1973's "I Will Always Love You" — which Whitney Houston re-recorded for 1992's The Bodyguard — about their professional split. Parton and Wagoner had made up by the time he passed from lung cancer in 2007, and she believes (via The Guardian) that "part of him will always live through me and my music." Even more heartbreaking, Parton sang to Wagoner on his deathbed, saying, "It felt good that I had the opportunity to say goodbye properly."
In 2017, The Detroit News reported that her longtime manager Don Warden had died of unknown causes. After working together for almost 50 years, Parton called him "Mr. Everything." In a post on her website, she described him "like a father, a brother, a partner, and one of my best friends."
The loss of country singer Kenny Rogers, who died in 2020 of natural causes, also "shocked" her, she told the TODAY. The two duetted on hits like "Islands in the Stream," and after his death, Parton said on Facebook that her "heart's broken, and a big ol' chunk of it has gone with him today."
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