Dolly was a beloved global icon, but she was actually a pretty private person.
On August 25, 2026, Dolly Parton sadly passed away at 80-years-old in Nashville Tennessee. Dolly had been dealing with undisclosed health issues for the last year or so, and she previously shared that she was having issues with severe kidney stones. Dolly’s reps confirmed she sadly died following a “brief battle with cancer,” though the specific kind was not revealed.
And this week, Stella sat down for her first formal interview since Dolly passed for CBS Mornings with Gayle King, where she opened up about why Dolly kept her cancer diagnosis a secret from the world, as well as a secret from some of her family members. The family also decided not to reveal which kind of cancer Dolly had “out of respect for her,” Stella revealed:
“Well, that was her her business. No, but she didn’t tell us that we could say it. So out of respect for her, I can talk about my love for her and describe who she is to me, but it’s not my business to tell her business.”
While Dolly shared so much of her life with the world, she kept a lot private too, and the world famously never knew really anything about her husband, Carl Dean. And of course, Dolly always kept her political views extremely private, and she even declined the Presidential Medal of Freedom three times, turning down the nation’s highest civilian honor twice from Donald Trump’s administration, and once under President Joe Biden.
While I’m sure there were multiple reasons as to why Dolly never wanted the public to know her political leanings, I think that’s actually pretty normal and understandable, not everyone wants to share those things with the world, but Stella says she obviously had them, but she simply “never would have offended anybody” by sharing.
Stella is quite the opposite, which she admitted to Gayle, and she often posts on X about her left-leaning political stances, and she says her sister was smarter than her, saying Dolly’s decision to keep her politics to herself was simply because she was “a good businesswoman”:
“She had them. I’m not telling. She would never have offended anybody. She never would’ve done that, she was smarter than me. You know, I’ll tell everything, and I like everybody know what I think about it, not her. Because she’s a good businesswoman. She’s a good businesswoman.”
When Gayle pressed her about whether Dolly agreed with Stella on politics, she shut that down, saying:
“I will not talk about that. You think you’re so clever, don’t you Gayle?”
Like everyone, Dolly certainly had her opinions, but there’s no denying that her choosing to refrain from getting into politics was a brilliant career move, and she remained one of the only, if not the only, universally beloved public figures in this century, honestly. Dolly always said she was a musician and an entertainer, and she always stayed true to that and did what she knew to do best.
And elsewhere in the interview, Stella revealed that she hadn’t heard from anybody in Nashville since Dolly passed, from entertainers she knows or anyone else. She thinks it might be because of her “political activism” on social media:
“I will say that I haven’t heard from anybody in Nashville since my sister passed away. I haven’t had one condolence from anyone that I know that, entertainers that I know, nobody. I explain it because I’m assuming it might be because my political activism on social media, I don’t know.”
I can’t imagine people that actually knew the family would not reach out to them for that reason, and that’s pretty shocking to hear considering how long Dolly lived in Nashville and what she meant to the country music community in particular.
Even if that’s the case, there’s no denying that the world is continuing to mourn and the Parton family has received a ton of love from fans worldwide.
The full interview is available here:
