Big blonde hair, a pink outfit, and a toothy smile. Dolly Parton’s image appeared on cake mix boxes, film posters, magazine covers, and paintings. In the wake of the country music legend’s death on Tuesday, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, took to Instagram to remember the “queen of country.”
The Smithsonian Institution shared three images that belong to the collection of the National Museum of American History. The first is of Parton in a pink dress against a painted backdrop featuring a columned house and parrot, which served as the back cover of her 1978 album Heartbreaker. The second image is a black and white photograph of the musician taken by Henry Horenstein in 1972; on the day of the shoot she told him that,“people don’t come out to see me looking like everybody else.” And the third image is a film poster of 9 to 5 (1980) featuring Parton next to her co-stars, Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, and Dabney Coleman. Parton wrote the film’s theme song, winning her two Grammy Awards and a People’s Choice Award for it.
The Warhol Museum posted a portrait of Parton taken in 1985. “We’re very saddened to hear of the passing of Andy Warhol’s friend, the singer, songwriter, actress, philanthropist and businesswoman,” the museum wrote in its caption.
Parton graced the cover of Warhol’s Interview magazine twice, making her debut with the July 1984 issue illustrated with her big hair and large breasts. Her second cover, for the July 1989 issue, shows her with wet hair in a white dressing robe, in a photograph taken by Herb Ritts.
Her 1984 appearance was accompanied by an interview conducted by Warhol and featuring Maura Moynihan, a friend of the Factory and the daughter of US Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Warhol asks Parton if she wants some lunch, and she responds with “I’d love a glass of white wine.”
When Warhol tells Parton that she has “the smallest waistline,” she replies, “That was always one of my best assets. I loved wearing tight things around the waist. My dad used to think I was making myself sick because he thought I was pulling myself that tight. I had a real pretty body when I was a girl, though it’s kind of gone downhill since then. When I went to Nashville, they liked my personality and I never sold myself out. I never went to bed with anybody unless I wanted to, never for business reasons.”
