The Dolly Parton Estate announced her niece, a retired airman, as its official brand ambassador this month.
Now-retired Lt. Col. Danielle Parton said she is proud to continue on the legacy of Dolly Parton, who she affectionately refers to as “Aunt Granny” in the video accompanying the announcement. In addition to her new role, Reserve + National Guard Magazine Contributor Noelle Wiehe spoke to the blonde-haired, green-eyed Tennessean before the estate’s new to learn more about how she built her own career portfolio and made an impact through her service with the Air National Guard.
Danielle spent two decades in the Air National Guard, with her final assignment serving as chief of public affairs for the 118th Public Affairs Wing in Nashville, Tennessee. She retired during a ceremony on Sept. 13, 2025, at Harris Hall on the Berry Field Air National Guard Base in Nashville.
“I enjoyed my career, and I’m glad that I did it,” Danielle told Reserve + National Guard Magazine, “and I’m glad I liked what I did.”
She reminisced on her service, saying at her retirement ceremony: “I truly enjoyed working with most of y’all, but that’s just the way life goes, you’re not gonna like everybody.”
Before she joined the military, Danielle said in 1998, a boyfriend from college — who she “couldn’t run off” — told her he’d never date a Hooters girl. She said she got off the phone, walked straight into Hooters and got a job.
“And it did work,” she said. “I ran him off.”
Departing Hooters and ready for her next challenge, Danielle reached out to her Aunt Dolly’s chauffeur, Walter Henry Hagan, who worked for American Airlines and told him she wanted to be a flight attendant. She said the training was one of the hardest she’d ever done, “believe it or not.”
During her operational experience trip — “my OE” — she said she figured out pilots and flight attendants lived the same lifestyle and schedule, “but one of them had a better-paying job, and it was not me.”
In 2000, after conversations with aviators she worked with, one pilot turned her onto the National Guard. She said he described it as the “best kept secret in the military.”
Three years later, Danielle went to the base in Nashville and said she wanted to become a pilot, join the Tennessee Air National Guard and get a pilot slot.
“I just knew they were just going to love me and pick me up right away,” she said. “Well, apparently they didn’t have the same opinion of me as I did.”
Instead, Danielle was told she was too old to be a pilot and that she would never fly in the 105th Airlift Squadron.
“I don’t take ‘no’ too well for an answer when it’s something I want, so I just kept on and finally talked them into it,” Danielle added.
She attended the Academy of Military Science in 2005 on a waiver for pilot training. At the time, she was informed that she had to start at or before turning 30, so her training began on her 30th birthday.
“I was by far one of the oldest people in that whole building,” she said. “At 30, I was a little set in my ways, and I never did really change — but I was a guardsman from day one. I was absolutely born to be a guardsman, and I could always cooperate to graduate. I had some growing pains learning the process, but once I did, I could really make it work in my favor. It was great.”
Danielle said she never ran from her affiliation to her famous rhinestone-clad country music-icon aunt. In fact, she realized in her 30s how much she resembled Dolly when she was the same age — and as she got older, Danielle says she became even more like her.
“I always thought she had the strangest mannerisms,” she said. “Then, somebody pointed out that I’m just as weird as she is — I have those mannerisms. They played them for me, and I was like, ‘Yes, I do.’ Isn’t that funny what you see in other people that you don’t see in yourself?”
Despite being recognized and with the family name sewn to her chest, she said she appreciated being “just another schmuck getting the shit kicked out of me, having to do these push-ups, working my butt off,” during her initial military training.
She says she did so many push-ups, she thought her name was “Drop.”
“And that’s true,” she said laughing. “I was just like everybody else. Nobody cared what I did or didn’t do, or who I was related to, because it really didn’t matter none to us at that time. That was a beautiful thing for me. I loved it.”
Danielle invited Dolly out to her graduations throughout her early military career, but she declined most of the time, not wanting her presence to distract the masses from her niece’s or her fellow service members’ accomplishments. For Danielle’s 20-year military retirement last year, however, she extended the invite without expectation and Aunt Dolly obliged with conviction, telling her niece, “Oh, I’m coming, and I’m going to speak.”
Danielle told Dolly she could do whatever she wanted at the event, and that she’d even give her a microphone. So, she did.
“Everybody’s seen her be Dolly Parton — the entertainer and the star — but that was the first time people in the audience got to see her be a family member, and talk about me as a little kid, and what was it like for her being my aunt and little stuff like that,” Danielle said. “It was real sweet.”
In true military fashion, not everybody expressed the sweetest sentiments about Danielle at her ceremony, but that’s exactly how she wanted it to be.
She said she deliberately asked to be “roasted” so non-military attendees in the audience could see how the uniformed service members truly functioned as opposed to just all the “pomp and circumstance,” she said, or traditional rituals at ceremonies.
From the start of her career up until 2016, Danielle flew C-130s and C-5s, deployed to Afghanistan, and earned the Combat Action Medal and Air Medal, and is on the Commodore’s List of Flying Excellence for undergraduate pilot training. Her Guard career also took her to the 123rd Airlift Wing in Kentucky and 164th Airlift Wing in Memphis.
During a 2008 deployment, right after pilot training, Danielle flew C-130s out of Bagram, Afghanistan, with her very first mission being a high-altitude airdrop. That deployment also brought her first scare. While her crew was looking for a bathroom in Jalalabad, a group of Afghan men made them think Danielle was about to be snatched. The crew left and “found alternative facilities, mainly the tire of the airplane,” she said.
Her 2013 deployment took her through Jordan, where the aircraft broke down and the crew was stuck for a couple of days. A security team member, named Timmy, insisted the group see Petra — one of the “Seven Wonders of the World.” Embassy staff set up cars and drivers for the next morning, and at the gate, a group of Jordanian men circled Danielle. She screamed and cursed until Timmy heard her. He pushed his way in, told them to back off, and the two walked out arm in arm “like we were a couple.” She said after that, “I professed my love to him every day in my life.”
Despite the scare and the broken plane, Danielle said “Petra was the coolest thing I’ve ever seen in my life. We had to make our own fun, and so I’ve just always been making my own fun with that and just creating fun out of absolutely awful situations. And you can have fun anywhere in the world under just about any situation; you can dream of it if you have the right attitude and the people around you have a good enough attitude to try to enjoy it. Everything is a choice, and I enjoyed almost everything I ever did. Even when there was hard stuff, I enjoyed it.”
From her deployment experiences, she said she values the people the most. She said she met one of her lifelong best friends in a bathroom at Bagram, and she learned that a C-130 crew “can take a joke and wear it out.”
“More than anything that I did that I’m proud of, I’m proud of the people and the friends that I made,” she said. “There’s a family you’re born in and the family you made, and I made a great family out of all my experience.”
In 2022, Danielle launched a moonshine distillery, Shine Girl, to the public. Sparked by catching sight of the Ole Smoky Mountain Moonshine billboard while flying, she went home and taught herself to make a mash, to ferment it and to distill it. She said being in the military, she always had people willing to test her product.
The Shine Girl tasting room opened at the beginning of October, just two doors down from the entrance of Dollywood.
“When I achieve whatever goal I’m after or whatever, I’m like, ‘Now I’m on to the next thing,’” she said. “It’s a checklist for me all the time. I’m like, ‘Finally got that done. Next.’”
From Hooters girl to flight attendant, pilot and business owner, Danielle is creating a legacy to live on, and she rarely lets anything get in her way. Even as she spoke to RNG Magazine, she said she had been healing from a partial mastectomy after having caught it at Stage 0.
“Believe me, it was not on my bingo card of things to deal with this year,” she said. “The only limitations you have in this world are the ones you allow yourself to have, and I believe that with my whole heart.”
Visit Shine Girl to shop products from Danielle Parton’s business.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This article has been updated from the print version of Reserve + National Guard Magazine to include the brand ambassadorship announcement and Shine Girl’s official opening.
