TOM LEONARD: Dolly Parton modelled her look on the 'town tramp' and never denied repeated affair rumours - but her brilliant business brain meant she could have been a billionaire if she hadn't given so much to charity

Dolly Parton never let anyone forget that she was born poor. So 'dirt poor' that her illiterate sharecropper daddy could only pay the doctor who delivered her in their one-room cabin in the Great Smoky Mountains with a sack of cornmeal.

Ferocious hard work, an irrepressible talent, an endearing persona and a sharp business brain transformed those deeply humble roots into a vast business empire that, it was said, would have made the iconic singer-songwriter into a billionaire if she didn't give so much away to good causes.

The incomparable Queen of Country, who has died aged 80, fans liked to think, summed up all that was best about America - a hard-working, God-fearing star who didn't forget her roots or the less fortunate, and didn't let celebrity go to her bouffant-haired head.

Anyone who dismissed her as a dumb blonde with big hair and an even bigger frontage were disarmed by her ready wit, which she often aimed at herself. 'It costs a lot of money to look this cheap,' she famously quipped. And also: 'I'm not offended by all dumb blonde jokes because I know I'm not dumb... and I also know that I'm not blonde.'

Parton didn't mind admitting that she once entered a Dolly lookalike drag queen contest and lost because she 'over-exaggerated' her look. 'They just thought I was some little short gay guy,' she laughed.

Over a more than 60 year career, Dolly sold at least 100 million records, writing such global hits as Jolene and I Will Always Love You that other stars clamoured to cover.

Yet the songs - more than 3,000 - she wrote were only a part of the huge Dolly brand. She churned out books (including four autobiographies), produced and acted in films  (9 to 5, Steel Magnolias and The Best Little Whorehouse In Texas) and TV shows, and monetised her image to an extent that other business-minded stars could only dream of.

Investing heavily in the eastern Tennessee where she was raised, she even had her own popular theme park Dollywood Parks and Resorts, the waterpark Dollywood's SplashCountry, a chain of 'equestrian dinner theatres' called the Dolly Parton Stampede (a four-course meal followed by a show featuring music, comedy and horse riding) and a Dolly hotel in Nashville. 

Parton, who earned the nickname 'The Iron Butterfly' for her combination of dainty feminity and hard-edged business brains, would joke that she looked like a woman but thought like a man. She amassed a fortune estimated at anywhere between $300 million and $500 million.

The one aspect of Parton that she gave little away about, despite her apparent breezy candour, was her private life. 

Despite her repeated denials that she was either lesbian or bisexual, it was long rumoured that her 59-year marriage to rarely-seen husband Carl Dean was a sham and that the real love of her life was her childhood friend and longtime assistant Judy Ogle, with whom she admitted spending years sharing a bed when she was touring.

However, it was neither Mr Dean nor Ms Ogle to whom Parton dedicated the song that made her far richer and more famous than any other.

I Will Always Love You, which she recorded in 1973 and which nearly two decades later became a huge international hit for Whitney Houston, was written as a farewell to her mentor and business partner, country music singer Porter Wagoner. 

As she freely acknowledged, professionally she was nothing before she met Wagoner. The fourth of 12 children, Parton credited her father with her business acumen and her mother - who had Welsh roots - for her singing ability. 

She started performing as a child, appearing on local radio by the age of 10 and recording her first single, Puppy Love, when she was 13. At school, fellow pupils were so jealous when she appeared on local TV that they locked her in a cupboard, leaving her with a life-long fear of the dark.

At 18, she left her hillbilly home for the country music capital of Nashville (her father gave her a gun to protect herself) on a single-minded 10-year journey to stardom.

In 1967, when she was 21, she'd already had a string of songs in the country charts - she was initially successful as a songwriter rather than a performer - when she was invited to appear as Wagoner's duet partner on his weekly TV show and also on his roadshow. 

Wagoner convinced his record label to sign her but while they were successful as a duo, both grew frustrated that neither could achieve much success on their own.

In her case, it hardly helped that she fulfilled an eye candy role on his TV series. Just 5ft tall, Parton was the first to admit that she was famous for different vital statistics, assets which she put to good advantage as she pouted and winked on the Porter Wagoner Show. (She finally came clean about her vital statistics in 1994, telling Vogue: 'I'm 40-20-36. I used to never tell anybody my measurements, but the older I get the more proud I am.')

She and Wagoner competed for who could wear the most outrageous outfit or hairdo - Wagoner preferred rhinestone suits and pompadour hairstyle while Parton freely admitted she'd modelled her look on the 'town tramp'. 

Unlike his partner, however, Wagoner didn't have to break off in the middle of each show and advertise sanitary towels.

However, it was clear that Parton wasn't going to let her fierce ambition be constrained for too long by having to appear in a show bearing somebody else's name.

She decided in late 1973 she needed to go it alone. 'We fought a lot,' Partons said later. 'We were very much alike. We were both stubborn. We both believed that we knew what was best for us. Well, he believed he knew what was best for me, too.'

Convinced he would never accept her reasons for leaving - she harboured dreams, soon fulfilled, of crossing over musically into pop and of breaking into Hollywood as an actress - she decided to hand in her notice with a song. 

Parton has said she wrote that song, I Will Always Love You, in the same day and night that she penned her other big hit, Jolene. (The latter, meanwhile, was inspired by a local redheaded bank teller who, Parton said, had a huge crush on her husband).

'I took it in the next morning. I said, 'Sit down, Porter. I've written this song, and I want you to hear it,' said Parton. 'So I did sing it. And he was crying. He said, 'That's the prettiest song I ever heard. And you can go, providing I get to produce that record.' And he did, and the rest is history.'

Wagoner, who had given Parton expensive jewelry and a royal blue Cadillac, sued her for $3 million for breach of contract in 1979, by which time they hadn't spoken for three years. 

Parton never entirely deserted him, bailing him out of tax problems and buying the publishing rights to his songs for hundreds of thousands of dollars. 

She later gave them back to him for nothing. When he died in 2007 from lung cancer, Parton came to see him on his deathbed, singing I Will Always Love To You to him two hours before he passed away.

Wagoner was, along with Burt Reynolds, Sylvester Stallone (her co-stars in the films and Best Little Whorehouse and Rhinestone respectively) and fellow country singer Billy Ray Cyrus, father of Miley, one of a clutch of celebrities with whom Parton was romantically linked.

However - unlike the lesbian rumours which she firmly denied - she mischievously encouraged the speculation by never confirming nor denying it. 'I've been accused of being involved with every man I'm ever seen with or worked with,' she said in 2012. 'Maybe I have, maybe I ain't. I never tell if I have.'

She married Carl Dean in Nashville in 1966, two years after meeting outside the Wishy Washy launderette on the day she arrived in town. 

Parton recounted how she emerged from the launderette just as Carl, three years older, drove by in his pick-up truck. He told her she was going to get sunburnt in her skimpy outfit and followed her back into the launderette to chat her up as she folded her clothes.

Dean, who owned a local asphalt business and died this year aged 82, is rarely mentioned in her latest memoir - Star of the Show: My Life on Stage - which was published this year. 

In fact, he featured so little in her public life that many wondered whether he actually existed. Parton explained that Dean hated being in the spotlight, adding that, as a hard rock fan, he didn't even much like her music. 

Fuelling whispers that their union was hardly fizzing with passion, Dolly liked to call him her 'tall drink of water'.

The couple had no children - Parton said she had a partial hysterectomy and realised she would never have the children she longed for.

Parton was vague about their union, admitting they had an open marriage but insisting she'd never cheated on him. She made conflicting comments, once saying: People always ask me if I've had extramarital affairs, and you can draw your own conclusions.'

In her 1994 autobiography she said Dean would wait loyally at home for her to return from her glamorous travels: 'He seems to know that I'll be back, and that love affairs and relationships are just part of my dealings with people.'

There were reports of wobbles in their marriage and that, weighed down by depression which she said runs through her family, Parton once vowed to leave him, only for her husband to rule out a divorce. 

It was also claimed that Dolly, who bought homes in Los Angeles and Hawaii in the eighties, became upset when Dean refused to visit either of them and took it as a sign he no longer loved her.

In public, however, Parton remained adamant they were a pair of 'old mountain goats' who 'will be together till one of us dies'.

Announcing her husband’s death last year, she wrote: 'Carl and I spent many wonderful years together. Words can't do justice to the love we shared for over 60 years.'

Her close relationship with Judy Ogle began at the age of seven when they were at best friends at school and continued when Ogle, a hairdresser, became her ever-present personal assistant. 'Judy came to work with me as my assistant, my valet, hairdresser, makeup artist, everything she needed to be,' said Parton in a 1994 memoir in which she revealed that Ogle, a former soldier who never married, even worked with her on late-night song writing sessions.

'I don't know what I would have done in my life without Judy,' she wrote. 'That's as pure a love as I have ever known, and that's a stronger bond than I have ever known.'

Describing their somewhat strange habit of sharing a bed when Parton was off on tour, the star said: 'Why scream across the room when you don't have to.'

Compounding the speculation, although Parton studiously stayed out of politics, reasoning that she had as many Democrats fans as Republican ones, she made an exception for gay and lesbian rights, publicly supporting gay marriage in 2009 and insisting it was 'un-Christian' to oppose it.

Parton, who insisted that 'if I was gay, I would have come out of the closet just a-flying', was also forced to deny rumours that she had a six-year affair with a male assistant, Mark Kiracofe, who she reportedly first met in 1989 when he was one of her stage equipment handlers. In 1996, it was claimed he had 'walked out of her life' after she refused to choose between him and husband Carl.

As with so many enduring stars, for Dolly, career came first - 'I'm just a working girl, I always just say that I'm a workhorse that looks like a show horse,' she said in November 2025.

Her abiding popularity was rambunctiously displayed in 2014 when she performed to a 180,000-strong crowd at the Glastonbury Festival who were young enough to be her grandchildren.

Asked to explain her abiding popularity, she said: 'I think that one of the things is because I love people, and I think they feel that, they sense that.'

'I think that people know that I've worked hard to get where I'm at and that I've stayed sane… for the most part.'