Journalist Paul Sexton has paid tribute to Dolly Parton, describing her as humble, honest and hilarious. He recalled that being in the same room as Dolly Rebecca Parton made you feel great, and that she was a whip-smart entrepreneur and as side-splittingly funny as a stand-up, bigger than country music itself.
Despite her fame, she stayed as humble and honest as the day she got to Nashville as an 18-year-old and, as she told him, "about died of homesickness".
From dirt-poor beginnings to global stardom
From her dirt-poor beginnings, Dolly set about becoming surely the most-loved star in the world, and she earned every penny. Sexton remembers her saying that she was on television before her family owned one. "We didn't have three rooms and a bath," she said. "We always joked that we had three rooms and a path, which was to the outside toilet."
Sexton was ridiculously fortunate to meet her on about half a dozen occasions, in the UK and in Dolly's Nashville offices, over roughly a 15-year period, to write newspaper and magazine features and to make programmes for Radio 2.
A meeting to remember in 2013
Perhaps his favourite of their meetings was in 2013, when he flew to Dolly's HQ for a Radio 2 show he was making called Dolly's Jukebox, in which she raved about such unexpected names as Adele and Otis Redding. He also told her that the night before, he had been in a Nashville pizza restaurant that had The Kitty on the menu, named after her country heroine Kitty Wells. "Well, we need to get a Dolly pizza, don't we!" she replied.
Dolly's fantastic sense of humour and refusal to take herself too seriously meant their conversations frequently dissolved into helpless laughter. As she put it: "If somebody says 'What do you look like without all that makeup?' I say 'I look like hell, but that's ok, who don't?'"
A head for business
Such humility belied a head for business that she built into an empire estimated to be worth half a billion dollars. If you were scheduled to talk to her for an hour, it didn't matter how famously you were getting on. With a minute to go, one of her staff would appear in your sightline, tapping their watch.
"I get a kick out of people getting a kick out of me," she said. "I just love to share, so it was natural for me to be an entertainer. I love people." He added: "We adored her back."
