The Dolly Parton family tree, twelve children of the Smoky Mountains

The Dolly Parton family tree starts with two young people from the mountains. Robert Lee Parton, called Lee, was born at Sevierville, Tennessee, on 22 March 1921, and Avie Lee Owens at Lockhart, South Carolina, on 5 October 1923. They married in 1939, when he was 17 and she was 15.¹

Lee worked as a sharecropper, later farmed a small tobacco farm and took construction jobs.^4,1 Avie Lee’s father, Jake Robert Owens, was a Pentecostal preacher who led a Church of God congregation that the children attended, and her brother Bill Owens became Dolly’s songwriting partner.⁴ Lee died in 2000 and Avie Lee in 2003.¹

Dolly had three older siblings, Willadeene, born in 1940, David Wilburn, born in 1942, and Coy Denver.^4,2 After her came Robert Lee Jr., called Bobby, Stella Mae, born on 4 May 1949, Cassie Nan and Randle Huston, called Randy, born on 15 December 1953.^4,5,6

The ninth child, Larry Garrold, lived about a day in 1955.⁴ Then came the twins Floyd Estel and Frieda Estelle, and last Rachel Ann, born on 31 August 1959.^4,7 People counts twelve children, eleven of whom lived to adulthood.¹ The sources opened for this page give no year of birth for Bobby, Cassie or the twins, so the chart leaves those years blank.

Several of the Partons made public careers. Stella is a country singer and songwriter whose singles charted in the late 1970s.⁵ Randy was a singer who worked in the family’s entertainment business, and he died on 21 January 2021.^6,3 Freida had her own recording career, Floyd wrote songs with Dolly, and Cassie sang backing vocals and appeared in her sister’s productions.³

Rachel, the youngest, is a singer and actress who worked under her married name of Dennison.⁷ Willadeene wrote a memoir and a cookbook.³ Outside the twelve, Dolly’s uncle Bill Owens wrote several charting singles with her, and in 1966 the two founded a publishing company, Owe-Par.⁴

Dolly moved to Nashville in 1964, the day after she finished at Sevier County High School. Outside a laundromat there she met Carl Thomas Dean, a Nashville native who ran an asphalt paving business he inherited from his father.⁴ They married at Ringgold, Georgia, on 30 May 1966, and renewed their vows for their fiftieth anniversary in May 2016.⁴

Dean shunned publicity and rarely went to public events with his wife, so he appears on the Dolly Parton family tree with no picture. The couple had no children. He died on 3 March 2025.^4,3

Floyd died in 2018 and Randy in 2021.² David died in November 2024 and Denver on 23 July 2026, both at the age of 82.² Dolly Parton died at Nashville on 25 August 2026, aged 80, and her nephew Bryan Seaver announced her death for the family.⁴

Dolly was godmother to the singer Miley Cyrus and often called her family, but Cyrus is not a blood relative and is not drawn.² Stella, Rachel and others of the twelve are living, so this Dolly Parton family tree gives them only names, years and public work, and draws none of their children.