Dolly Parton will reportedly be the first country music artist to ever receive the Recording Academy’s MusiCares Person of the Year Honor during next year’s Grammy Awards.
The Recording Academy has not announced the honor just yet, but sources told Page Six that Parton will get the honor. Parton’s representatives also did not comment.
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She would only be the seventh female solo artist to get the award, following Aretha Franklin, Carole King, Barbra Streisand, Gloria Estefan, Natalie Cole and Bonnie Raitt. Last year’s honoree was Fleetwood Mac.
“She’s country, but she’s also pop — she’s everything,” one music executive told Page Six when explaining Parton’s honor.
The MusiCares gala began in 1991 and takes place during Grammy week. The event honors musicians who have contributed to the music world and have dedicated their lives to philanthropic and humanitarian efforts. Since it launched, the gala has raised over $90 million for MusiCares, a foundation set up to help those in the music industry in financial, medical and personal need.
Parton, 72, certainly has stepped up with her philanthropy. Earlier this month, the group Leadership Tennessee gave Parton the first Dolly Parton Excellence in Leadership Award at the County Music Hall of Fame to recognize her efforts to raise money for the victims of the Smoky Mountain wildfires in 2016. Her telethon raised $12.5 million for victims.
Parton is also famous for her Imagination Library, which has provided more than 100 million books to children in the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and Australia since she started it in 1995. The program was inspired by Parton’s father, Robert Lee Parton, who could not read or write.
“We never thought it would be this big,” Parton said of the program in a March interview with NPR. “I just wanted to do something great for my dad and for my home county and, at the most, maybe a couple of counties over. But then it just took wings of its own, and I guess it was meant to be.”
Parton also had a busy summer. In early August, she announced a $37 million expansion to the Dollywood resort in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. It is part of a plan to invest $300 million in refurbishments over the next decade.
Most of the money will be spent on Wildwood Grove, the first new Dollywood area in a decade. It will be inspired by Parton’s own childhood and is expected to open in 2019.
“We felt like this was a great thing that we could do for kids to really explore and to be adventurous and to find their own little true self, their own little natural selves, rather than all the technical stuff,” Parton said in August.
The 61st Annual Grammy Awards will be held at the Staples Center in Los Angeles on Feb. 10, 2019.
Photo credit: Jason LaVeris/FilmMagic/Getty Images
