Over the course of her incredible six-decade career as an entertainer, Dolly Parton racked up a stunning number of achievements and accolades — including two Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 singles, 10 Grammy wins (one the Lifetime Achievement Award) and induction to both the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Country Music Hall of Fame. But one that alluded the legendary late performer during her lifetime was a Billboard 200 No. 1 album.
Parton was certainly no stranger to the chart, having racked up a whopping 50 entries on the 200 in her career, starting with the No. 184-peaking Just the Two of Us alongside Porter Wagoner in 1969. But despite reaching the listing’s top 20 nine times and the top 10 three times, she never found her way to No. 1 on the chart — getting closest with the No. 3-peaking Rockstar in 2023.
But the book might not be completely closed on that. Following Parton’s death earlier this week, her streams have exploded, as a nation in mourning looks to celebrate her life and work once more. On Tuesday (Aug. 25), the day of her death, she was the second-most-streamed artist in the country, with her official on-demand U.S. streams up over 2,000% from the prior Tuesday — and those streams just continued to rise on Wednesday, to over 46 million, according to early data provided by Luminate.
Those streams are resounding enough to make her one of the most-streamed artists of the whole week, despite the fact that she was only racking up a little over one million streams a day in the first few days of the tracking week (which starts on Friday). And as far as the Billboard 200 goes, most of those streams are counted towards her 2003 compilation Ultimate Dolly Parton. (Billboard chart rules determine that individual song streams count towards whichever album collection they can be found on which is the highest-selling set for that tracking week; Ultimate Dolly Parton has sold nearly 6,000 copies so far for the tracking week ending Aug. 27, according to early data provided by Luminate, making it her current best-seller.)
Ultimate Dolly Parton has history on the Billboard 200, having debuted at No. 130 on the chart upon its 2003 release, and returned to a new peak of No. 112 on the Jan. 19, 2019 chart. The compilation includes many of the Parton classics currently performing the best on DSPs, including “Jolene,” “I Will Always Love You,” “9 to 5” and the Kenny Rogers duet “Islands in the Stream.”
Will the collective streams be enough to get the modest-selling set to No. 1 for next week? The greatest challenge it will likely have is in getting past The Sin: Bliss, the new set from K-pop male vocal group ENHYPEN. That sextet is also looking for its first No. 1 on the Billboard 200 — and has gotten even closer than Parton in the recent past, getting to No. 2 twice on the chart, including with this January’s The Sin: Vanish: 7th Mini Album. (Bliss is available for purchase in a wide variety of physical and digital variants on the group’s webstore, and is expected to sell very well.) The timing is also not particularly working in the favor of Parton’s set, as news of her death came on Tuesday afternoon, with just two and a half days in the tracking week remaining — as Billboard‘s tracking week runs from Friday to Thursday.
Even if Ultimate Dolly Parton doesn’t ultimately have the sales numbers to get past ENHYPEN on next week’s chart, it still has a very good chance of finishing No. 2 on the listing — which would still be a new career-best for Parton. And if her streams remain strong through the next week, with a full week of increased streams to work with, it could be in contention for the top of the following week’s Billboard 200 as well, as more and more listeners discover and rediscover Parton’s classic catalog.
