Dolly Rebecca Parton was born on January 19, 1946, in Locust Ridge, Tennessee, near the Great Smoky Mountains, the fourth of twelve children born to Robert Lee Parton Sr., a sharecropper and laborer, and Avie Lee Owens Parton, who sang and played music for the family. The Partons lived in severe poverty in a small cabin, without many of the comforts that most families took for granted, but Dolly later