YEAR
2022
INDUCTED BY
P!NK
CATEGORY
Performers
With her prodigious songwriting talent, vocal and instrumental prowess, charisma, and trademark style, Dolly Parton has achieved immense global success as a musician and blazed a trail for generations of artists to come. In a career spanning six decades, she has recorded more than 50 studio albums and, by her own estimation, written nearly 3,000 songs.
HALL OF FAME
ESSAY
By Holly George-Warren
“If somebody said, ‘You’re going to have to do one or the other. You’re going to have to give up your music or you’re going to go back to being poor,'” Dolly Parton mused twenty years ago, “I would go poor, totally broke, and start over and do my music. That’s how much I love it.” Chances are slim to none that this versatile singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, charismatic performer, and media mogul will ever have to make such a choice. Nearly sixty years after she left her East Tennessee home at 18 to make it in Nashville, Parton has deftly engaged her vast talent, unique persona, and sheer determination to forge a near-unparalleled career: from country music star to crossover superstar to movie star to global icon to beloved humanitarian and philanthropist. Through it all, one hundred million album sales later, she’s remained a storyteller supreme.