In 1954, inside a one-room cabin in Locust Ridge, Tennessee, where Dolly Parton grew up with eleven brothers and sisters, her maternal uncle Bill Owens handed the eight-year-old girl her first real six-string baby Martin guitar. Before her uncle returned from military service with that instrument, Dolly had been making up rhymes at age five on a battered mandolin and an old guitar strung with two banjo strings, asking her mother, Avie Lee, to write down the words on old calendars and cardboard boxes while her father, tobacco farmer Lee Parton, worried about feeding twelve children. Sitting on the cabin porch, Uncle Bill taught his niece her first chords while she practiced until her fingertips calloused and slept with the small guitar in the crowded family bed. By 1956, when Dolly was ten, Bill drove her down mountain roads in his old car to Knoxville to sing on “The Cas Walker Farm and Home Hour.” Three years later, in 1959, he drove the thirteen-year-old more than 600 miles to Goldband Records in Lake Charles, Louisiana, packing homemade sandwiches and sleeping in the car seats so they could record her debut single, “Puppy Love,” which the two wrote together. After Dolly graduated high school in 1964, Uncle Bill joined her in Nashville, where they scraped together loose change for canned food while signing with Combine Music and co-writing songs like the 1966 Top 10 hit “Put It Off Until Tomorrow,” recorded by Bill Phillips with Dolly singing uncredited harmony. As his niece grew into a global star, Bill never asked for fame, returning home in his work clothes to spend his later years planting tens of thousands of American chestnut trees across Dollywood. When he passed away on April 7, 2021, at age 85, Dolly wrote that the world would never have known her name without the uncle who put a real six-string guitar in her hands and drove her out of the mountains.

In the summer of 1964, eighteen-year-old Dolly Parton joined her maternal uncle, twenty-eight-year-old Bill Owens, in Nashville, where the pair signed publishing contracts with Fred Foster’s Combine Music and lived on canned food and restaurant ketchup soup while pitching songs along Music Row.

Ten years earlier, in 1954, after returning from military service to the one-room cabin in Locust Ridge, Tennessee, where tobacco farmer Lee Parton and his wife, Avie Lee, were raising twelve children, Owens had handed his eight-year-old niece her first real six-string baby Martin guitar. Up to that day, Parton had been making up rhymes on a battered mandolin and an old guitar strung with two banjo strings while her mother wrote down the words on old calendars and cardboard boxes.

Sitting on the wooden cabin porch, Owens taught Parton her first guitar chords as she practiced until her fingertips calloused and carried the small instrument into the crowded family bed at night. Recognizing how serious she was about music, Owens drove the ten-year-old down the mountain in 1956 to Knoxville, where she earned her first paid appearances on businessman Cas Walker’s *Farm and Home Hour* radio and television broadcasts.

Three years later, in 1959, Owens packed homemade sandwiches into his car and drove thirteen-year-old Parton and her grandmother more than 600 miles to Eddie Shuler’s Goldband Records in Lake Charles, Louisiana, sleeping in the car seats so she could cut her debut single, “Puppy Love,” a rockabilly track uncle and niece wrote together. By 1961 and 1962, Owens and his brother Louis, performing as the Owens Brothers with their band the Kinfolks, brought fourteen-year-old Dolly and her younger sisters Stella and Cassie into a Knoxville studio as the Vocalaires to sing backup on the singles “Vagabond” and “It Seems Like a Lifetime”.

Once Parton arrived in Nashville in May 1964 after graduating from Sevier County High School, Owens worked alongside her as producer, bandleader, and co-writer while playing touring guitar for Grand Ole Opry acts like Ray Pillow. At Combine Music, Owens and Parton teamed up to write “Friends Tell Friends” for Ray Price and “The Company You Keep,” which reached No. 8 on the Billboard country chart for Bill Phillips in 1966.

Later that year, Phillips recorded another Owens and Parton composition, “Put It Off Until Tomorrow,” featuring Parton’s uncredited high harmony on the chorus. The single climbed to No. 6 on the country chart and earned the uncle and niece the 1966 BMI Song of the Year award.

In early 1967, Skeeter Davis took their co-written ballad “Fuel to the Flame” into the country Top 20, while Foster included Parton’s own recording of the track on her debut Monument Records album, *Hello, I’m Dolly*. When their initial contract with Combine Music expired in 1967, Owens, Parton, and Louis Owens merged the first three letters of their last names to launch Owepar Publishing Company, building Fireside Studios in Nashville and writing material for Parton’s early RCA albums, including *In the Good Old Days (When Times Were Bad)* and *My Blue Ridge Mountain Boy*.

Over his life, Owens wrote or co-wrote more than 800 songs, yet he stepped back from the Nashville spotlight as his niece became an international star. Returning home to East Tennessee in his work clothes, he joined Parton’s Dollywood theme park in Pigeon Forge as an entertainment performer and resident park ranger.

Across more than three decades at Dollywood, Owens dedicated his daily work to restoring the American chestnut tree, which had been nearly wiped out across the Great Smoky Mountains by an early twentieth-century fungal blight. Partnering with the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, the American Chestnut Foundation, and the American Eagle Foundation, Owens cross-pollinated blight-resistant trees by hand, harvested burs from cherry-picker cranes, and planted an estimated 70,000 chestnut trees and seedlings across Dollywood and the surrounding foothills alongside his wife, Sandy.

In September 2012, Parton recorded and released the acoustic tribute song “O Chestnut Tree” as a free download to support her uncle’s reforestation work with the American Chestnut Foundation. When Owens died on April 7, 2021, at age 85, Parton established the Bill Owens American Chestnut Fund at Dollywood and accepted the Chestnut Conservation Champion Award in his memory the following summer, before passing away herself at age 80 in August 2026.

In her eulogy for the uncle who had handed an eight-year-old girl a six-string Martin guitar on a Locust Ridge cabin porch and driven her to Louisiana and Nashville, Parton wrote that she never would have been there if he had not been there first.