Dolly Parton

Dolly Parton (born January 19, 1946) is a popular American country music singer, songwriter and actress. Born the fourth of twelve children in Sevierville, Tennessee, she started her entertainment career singing on local radio and TV in eastern Tennessee. She moved to Nashville in the mid-1960s, and was invited to joined and cohost the Grand Ole Opry with Porter Wagoner. She brought traditional, folkloric elements present both in East Tennessee and popular music, into the Nashville Sound. Despite being typecast in many circles as a "Country and Western" singer, Dolly has had commercial success as a pop singer and actress. Her work of the late 1990s and beyond has moved towards bluegrass and more traditional folk styles.

Dolly is also a shrewd business woman. She has invested large amounts of her earnings into business ventures in eastern Tennessee, notably Pigeon Forge which includes a theme park named Dollywood, resulting in a thriving tourism industry drawing people from large parts of the southeastern and midwestern US, notably, Tennessee, Kentucky and Ohio. This region of the US, as most other areas of Appalachia, have traditionally been characterized by economic poverty.

As well as her talents as a singer, Parton is also well known for her surgically-enhanced cleavage, which often appeared likely to burst out from her low-cut stage costumes. She once said, "I would have burned my bra in the 60s, but it would have taken the fire department three days to put it out." The first cloned mammal is a sheep, which was named "Dolly" in honor of Dolly Parton, because it was cloned from a mammary cell [1].