She was, in the most precise sense, a phenomenon — a woman who emerged from the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee carrying a guitar, an unbreakable wit, and a voice so luminous that it seemed to belong to no single era. Dolly Rebecca Parton, who has died at the age of 80 following a cancer diagnosis, wrote her first song as a child and never really stopped, eventually amassing a catalogue that stretched across decades, continents, and genres, touching listeners from the honky-tonks of Nashville to the living rooms of rural Australia. Her artistry was never merely decorative. Behind the towering wigs and the rhinestone glamour — which she wore, as she once suggested, with deliberate and subversive intent — lay one of the most disciplined and prolific creative minds that popular music has ever produced.

She wrote "I Will Always Love You" not as a farewell to a lover but as a farewell to a mentor, and when Whitney Houston's recording of that song became a global event in 1992, Parton received the publishing royalties with characteristic grace and characteristic humour. She was a pioneer for women in an industry that had long preferred them silent or decorative, and she navigated its pressures without losing either her warmth or her sharp sense of self. The tributes that poured in after news of her death broke were remarkable not only for their volume but for the breadth of the lives she had apparently touched. Colleagues, heads of state, and ordinary fans who had grown up with her records all reached for the same word: gift.