Dolly Parton Returns to Billboard 200 Top 5, Notching Second-Highest-Charting Album Ever

Dolly Parton’s best-of collection Ultimate Dolly Parton re-enters the Billboard 200 albums chart dated Sept. 5 at No. 5, marking the late icon’s fourth top 10-charted set and her second-highest-charting album ever.

Parton died on Aug. 25 at age 80 after a short battle with cancer. The entertainer previously visited the top 10 with the all-star collaborations project Rockstar (No. 3 in 2023, her highest-charted album), Blue Smoke (No. 6 in 2014) and the collaborative album Trio (No. 6, in 1987) with Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris.

Ultimate Dolly Parton was released in 2003 and originally peaked at No. 112 in 2019. Until this week, it hadn’t been on the chart since 2020. In the Aug. 21-27 tracking week, which reflects less than three days of impact following the announcement of Parton’s death, Ultimate Dolly Parton earned 59,000 equivalent album units (up from a negligible sum in the previous week), largely driven by streaming activity of the songs on the album.

The 20-track Ultimate Dolly Parton includes familiar Parton favorites such as “Jolene,” “I Will Always Love You,” “Here You Come Again,” “9 to 5” and “Islands In the Stream” (with Kenny Rogers). Many of the songs on this album are shared among other Parton projects — hits compilations and studio albums. For chart purposes, songs shared across an artist’s albums have their streaming equivalent album units and track equivalent album units assigned to whichever of those albums sells the most, by pure album sales, in a given week. In the latest tracking week, Ultimate Dolly Parton was the legend’s best-selling album, with 7,000 copies sold.

The Billboard 200 chart ranks the most popular albums of the week in the U.S. based on multi-metric consumption as measured in equivalent album units, compiled by Luminate. Units comprise album sales, track equivalent albums (TEA) and streaming equivalent albums (SEA). Each unit equals one album sale, or 10 individual tracks sold from an album, or 2,500 ad-supported or 1,000 paid/subscription on-demand official audio and video streams generated by songs from an album. The new Sept. 5, 2026-dated chart will be posted in full on Billboard‘s website on Sept. 1. For all chart news, follow @billboard and @billboardcharts on both X, formerly known as Twitter, and Instagram.