All About Dolly Parton's Late Parents, Robert Lee and Avie Lee Parton

Robert Lee and Avie Lee Parton had 12 children, including country music legend Dolly Parton

Dolly Parton is a country music legend, philanthropist and style icon — but she had to overcome a lot to get there. She grew up as one of 12 children of Robert Lee (who goes by Lee) and Avie Lee Parton in the Smoky Mountains of Eastern Tennessee.

Today, Dolly’s superstar career has included several Grammy awards and Oscar, Emmy and Tony nominations. She's also written best-selling books like Songteller, starred in iconic movies like Steel Magnolias and 9 to 5, opened her own Dollywood theme park and secured a permanent place in the hearts of fans across the globe.

Many members of the Parton family have been involved in her career, too. She's also found ways to honor her parents, Lee and Avie Lee, who died in 2000 and 2003, respectively. Lee inspired her nonprofit Imagination Library, which has given more than 200 million books to children all over the world, and there are tributes to both her parents throughout her theme park.

But who are Robert Lee and Avie Lee Parton? Read on to learn about their life raising 12 children in a two-room mountain cabin, how Dolly included them in her country music career and how she keeps their memory alive today.

They were married in 1939

Lee was born on March 22, 1921, in Sevierville, Tennessee, while Avie Lee was born on Oct. 5, 1923, in Lockhart, South Carolina. They married in 1939, when Lee was 17 and Avie Lee was 15. Lee was a sharecropper who sometimes worked construction jobs to make ends meet, and Avie was a homemaker.

In a 1990 appearance on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, Dolly recounted the Christmas when all the kids agreed to give up their own gifts so that Lee could get Avie Lee a wedding ring. “I must have been 8 or 10 years old, and my mother had never had a wedding ring,” Dolly said. “There was a houseful of kids around that time and Daddy decided he was finally going to buy Momma a wedding ring. Of course, that meant that nobody else was going to get any gifts. That costs money.”

But even though they didn’t get anything of their own that year, Dolly continued, it was one of their happiest Christmases because they could make their mother so joyful.

The family was very poor, but as Dolly has said, she never cared about their lack of wealth when she was young. “We always made jokes and said we didn’t even know we were poor till some smart aleck up and told us,” she said on Today in 2015. “We didn’t have any money, but we were rich in things that money don’t buy. You know, like love and kindness and understanding.”

They had a huge family

Lee and Avie Lee had 12 children, 11 of whom lived to adulthood: Willadeene, David, Dolly, Robert Jr., Stella, Cassie, Randy, Larry, twins Floyd and Freida, and Rachel.

Related: Dolly Parton's Siblings: All About the Country Legend's 11 Brothers and Sisters

Larry, Lee and Avie Lee's ninth child, died just four days after he was born in 1955. In 2015, Dolly told TV critics, per Fox News, that she shared a special bond with her late brother as he was going to be “her baby.“

"My mother, through the years, when we were born, since there were so many of us, used to say, 'This one is gonna be you baby.’ That just meant that you got to take extra care of it. You have got to get up with it at night and rock it back and forth,” Dolly explained, saying she experienced “a lot of heartache” when he died when she was just 9 years old.

She added: “All things are hard, but that is what makes your memories. That is what makes you who and what you are.”

They supported Dolly’s music career from childhood

Dolly started teaching herself to play a homemade guitar at age 7 and made her first few public performances on a local Knoxville radio station at 10.

"I grew up in a very musical family, all my mother's people were very musical, so I was always around people playing instruments and singing, and my mom singing the old songs," Dolly told PEOPLE in 2020. "So that was just part of my being and I just knew I loved it. I just continued doing that, it was just a natural thing."

In 2019, during a celebration of her 50th year in the Grand Ole Opry, the singer reflected on her lifetime in music. “You never know what’s going to happen to you in your life,” Dolly said. “You never know if your dreams are going to come true. And if they do, you wonder how people will remember you when you’re older. And I’m older, and I’m seeing how people remember me, and that makes me feel very humble. And I’m just very honored that I’m still around, not only to just get to accept this, but that I can actually perform and get out there and still do what I love to do.”

Dolly's hit song "Coat of Many Colors" was inspired by Avie Lee

In her hit 1971 song “Coat of Many Colors” (which Dolly has called her favorite of the more than 3,000 she’s written), Dolly sings about a winter coat that Avie Lee sewed for her from a box of scrap fabric someone had gifted the family. While Avie Lee stitched the jacket, she also told her daughter the Biblical story of Joseph wearing a similar coat of many colors.

“As she sewed, she told a story / From the Bible she had read,” Dolly sang, “About a coat of many colors / Joseph wore and then she said / Perhaps this coat will bring you / Good luck and happiness.” While Dolly was pleased with the creation, when she got to school, kids made fun of her for wearing rags.

“The song of ‘Many Colors’ represents a very special time in my life, and the fact that so many people loved it really touches my life,” Dolly said in 2016 when she received the Tex Ritter Award from the Academy of Country Music.

Since the song's release, the tune — and the legend of the Coat of Many Colors — has been shared with generations. Dolly penned a children’s book, Coat of Many Colors, in 1994. She also made two made-for-tv movies about her childhood: Coat of Many Colors in 2015 and its sequel Christmas of Many Colors: Circle of Love in 2016.

When the first film premiered, Dolly said it brought back many memories. "It brought us back together as family and made us miss mama and daddy a lot,” Dolly told PEOPLE. “They’re gone now, but we get a chance to see our brothers and sisters again and when we were little, and think of mama and daddy and all that they meant to us.”

They appeared on Dolly's variety show in the '70s

When Dolly starred on her eponymous variety show in the 1970s, she brought her parents and seven siblings on as guests to sing the hymn “In the Sweet By and By.”

"When I got my own TV show I thought, 'I'm most definitely going to have my family on before I bring all these big celebrities because they're the stars to me,' " Dolly said on Time Life’s Dolly: The Ultimate Collection, released in 2020.

"Most of the folks that you see behind me are my brothers and sisters, and the two folks responsible for all of us: my mom and daddy," she said on the show.

Dolly's siblings were also involved in her career. Many have collaborated with her on duets, played in her band, and been a part of Dollywood.

Dolly created a tribute to Robert Lee and Avie Lee at her theme park, Dollywood

Though it’s a theme park with intense roller coasters and award-winning food, Dollywood is also a tribute to where Dolly came from — both the Smoky Mountains and her family home. The park has a “Tennessee Mountain Home,” which is a replica of the two-room cabin where the family lived. Robert Jr. built the cabin, and Avie Lee decorated it herself.

“Mama’s having a good time going around to antique stores,” Dolly told PEOPLE in 1986. “She thinks we couldn’t open Dollywood without her.”

Today, there are memorials to Lee and Avie Lee in the cabin's front garden.

Dolly's Imagination Library is a tribute to her father

Although Dolly has made made many charitable contributions throughout her decades-long career, the endeavor she is proudest of is the Imagination Library, a non-profit she launched in 1995 to help young children learn how to read. She founded it as a way to honor her father, Lee.

“My dad was not able to read and write — he was a country boy with a bunch of kids, and he had to work instead of going to school when he was a little boy, and so he never had the chance to get an education,” she told PEOPLE in 2017. “It seemed to really bother him a lot and I thought, ‘Well, what can I do for my precious dad?’ ‘Cause he was the greatest daddy in the world and one of the smartest people I’d ever known.”

“So I said, ‘Dad, why don’t we put together a little program where we give children books from the time they’re born, once a month, until they start school?’ ” Dolly explained. “That way, they can learn to read, love books. If you can read, you can kinda self-educate.”

Since 1995, the organization has gifted more than 200 million books to kids across the globe.

“Before he passed away, my Daddy told me the Imagination Library was probably the most important thing I had ever done,” Dolly wrote in an open letter on the Imagination Library's website. “I can’t tell you how much that meant to me because I created the Imagination Library as a tribute to my Daddy. He was the smartest man I have ever known but I know in my heart his inability to read probably kept him from fulfilling all of his dreams.”

Avie Lee's cooking is still served at Dollywood today

Dolly has published many cookbooks over the years, and a lot of what she cooks is based on her mother’s recipes. In 2018, Dolly told Entertainment Weekly that she always cooks her mother’s dumplings during the holidays, and the family likes hers best because they’re most like Avie Lee's.

“My mom’s dead now, but everybody else, they put too much butter, too much lard, they won’t do this and that. But I still cook good!” Dolly said.

But it’s not just the Parton family that gets to eat Avie Lee's cooking. At Song & Hearth, a restaurant in Dollywood’s DreamMore Resort, Dolly’s mother’s recipe for Stone Soup is on the menu daily. According to The Takeout, Avie Lee would make Stone Soup — a hearty vegetable soup with a stone hidden in the pot — when one of the kids was feeling down.

"Mama had a way of sensing which one of us kids needed a little extra attention, which one might be a little down. She would announce that we were having stone soup for supper and send us all out to pick out a pebble," Dolly wrote in her 1994 memoir Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business. “We took it seriously, as if the stones actually had some power to make the soup better. I suppose if that many kids believe a rock can make soup taste better, it can.”

Dolly’s parents took great pride in her success

In 1987, shortly after Dollywood opened, Sevier County erected a statue in Dolly’s honor in front of the county courthouse in Sevierville, a short distance from where she grew up.

For Apple Fitness’s “Time to Walk” series, Dolly told a story about how proud her father was of the statue, and how he would secretly go to clean it at night. "That touched me so much," she said. "I loved my daddy and wanted him to be proud of himself, as I was proud of him."

Avie Lee was also proud of her daughter's accomplishments and shared some early memories of Dolly in a 1975 Christmas letter to Dolly's fan club. She recalled the time when the family sold the house they built after buying a a farm because "we didn't need two houses." Avie Lee continued, "I cried anyway because I felt close to the home Lee and I had built with our own hands. I remember Dolly saying, 'Don't cry Mama. I'll buy it back for you when I get rich.' "

Five years later — after Avie Lee had long forgotten Dolly's promise — Dolly came home and told her parents she had bought the house back.

“Dolly has always been sincere in that when she tells someone she is going to do something she does it,” Avie Lee added.

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