Sevier County’s Dolly Parton will be honored in May by the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, with will an honorary doctorate of humane and musical letters, pending approval by the UT Board of Trustees later this month. This would be the second honorary degree the campus has ever granted.

“Dolly Parton, whose musical career has spanned more than five decades and 3,000 original musical compositions, is one of the most recognizable figures in American culture," UT-K says Tuesday in a press release.

"It is an incredible honor for me to receive this degree from a prestigious university like UT. I've been a volunteer all my life and entertained folks around the world with 'Rocky Top,'" Parton joked. "Seriously, education and the arts are very important to me, and this degree is something that makes me and would have made my parents very proud."

In 1996, Parton founded the Imagination Library in 1996 in Sevier County, which provides children with a new age-appropriate book every month from birth to age five. Since then, the program has now grown to serve 1,000 communities in 47 states, the United Kingdom and Canada, including all 95 counties in Tennessee through a partnership with the Governor's Books from Birth Foundation.  The Foundation is close to distributing more than 20 million books. 

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