Country music icon Dolly Parton dies at 80 after brief cancer battle

From a one-room shack in the Great Smoky Mountains to the stages of the world, Dolly Parton spent eighty years proving that authenticity, when held with enough grace and humor, becomes its own kind of immortality. The country music icon died Tuesday at Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center in Nashville, surrounded by family, after a brief battle with cancer — leaving behind not only fifty years of music but a philanthropic legacy that touched millions of lives. Her passing drew mourning from across the political and cultural spectrum, a rare testament to a life that refused to be divided by the cate