Dolly Rebecca Parton is an American singer songwriter, author, multi instrumentalist, actress and philanthropist, best known for her work in country music. She is one of the most successful female country artists, garnering the title of  The Queen of Country Music.

Dolly is the first to say she’s not the youngest singer in the business. She is name dropped by young artists like Taylor Swift and Lady Antebellum as an artist that has inspired them in their own careers. Despite the youth of today’s hit makers, Dolly is still hanging tough in the industry  and taking on new technology.

Dolly released her latest album, Better Day, last week.  The album, which debuted at No. 9 on Billboard’s Country Chart, is full of songs that are meant to be uplifting. Dolly penned all the songs on the album which were inspired by events like the tsunami in Japan, conflict in the Middle East and America’s economic crisis.

I don’t write just to relieve my own anxieties, I write for the people who can’t express themselves, Dolly said. I can’t save the world, but I might be able to save someone today if I can put them in a better mood. The music’s designed to be like a ray of sunshine for all those folks in the dark.

Dolly recently stopped by the GAC studios to chat about her new album and upcoming world tour. She had a lot to say so if you missed her.

Oprah Winfrey is an American television host, actress, producer, and philanthropist, best known for her self titled, multi award winning talk show, which has become the highest rated program of its kind in history and was nationally syndicated from 1986 to 2011. She has been ranked the richest African American of the 20th century,the greatest black philanthropist in American history and was for a time the world's only black billionaire. She is also, according to some assessments, the most influential woman in the world. Winfrey was born into poverty in rural Mississippi to a teenage single mother and later raised in an inner city Milwaukee neighborhood. She experienced considerable hardship during her childhood. Credited with creating a more intimate confessional form of media communication,she is thought to have popularized and revolutionized the tabloid talk show genre pioneered by Phil Donahue,which a Yale study claims broke 20th century taboos and allowed LGBT people to enter the mainstream. criticized for unleashing confession culture, promoting controversial self help ideas,and an emotion centered approach,she is often praised for overcoming adversity to become a benefactor to others.

Oprah Winfrey accepted an honorary degree from a central South African university infamous for troubled race relations. She accepted the degree from a South African university that has been called a model of reconciliation for its response to a racist student video that shocked the nation. Winfrey came to a school where five years ago, four white students made a video humiliating black housekeeping staff they are shown eating a stew the students had mimed spiking with urine and expressing opposition to integrating the historically white University of the Free State. Jonathan Jansen, who in 2009 became the university's first black rector, called for the four to be forgiven and rehabilitated. Jansen withstood accusations he was conceding too much to racists as he led the university, the students and the cleaners in a closely watched discussion of the role forgiveness could play in post apartheid South Africa. In a campus ceremony earlier this year, the students' public apology was accepted by the cleaners.

After receiving her honorary education doctorate Friday, Winfrey called five cleaners to the stage and pronounced them heroes. Winfrey said she had approached Jansen after reading about his work, and accepted an invitation to come to speak to students. University officials decided to make it a grand event. A roar from hundreds of people gathered outside first alerted those inside the university auditorium that Winfrey was about to enter for a ceremony for one that offered as much pomp, circumstance, song and dance as a full class's graduation. She threw her arms out with joy when told she was now a member of the university family a "Kovsie." Other moments moved her to tears. She kneeled on a padded stool to have her degree bestowed, flashing red stiletto heels to the cheering audience of all races.

The event brought international media to normally quiet Bloemfontein, the farming center where the century old, 31,000 student university is based. Susan Mshumpela, a 37 year old Bloemfontein native, came to the ceremony proudly dressed in the black robes she wore when she accepted her MBA from Free State last year. Mshumpela, operations manager for an agency that helps small businesses, said she hoped Winfrey's visit would give her alma mater a chance to tell the world about its strengths. "The eyes of the world are here," she said. "I don't think a person of her stature could just accept an honorary degree from just any university. She would want to be associated with a university of stature."

Nadipha Jacobs, a black student, says the university is growing more tolerant.Chantell De Reuck, a white graduate student strolling across campus Friday with her friend Jacobs, said the divides that are healing weren't just along racial lines. When she arrived as an undergraduate in 1999, she was among only six English speaking students in a dorm dominated by Afrikaners, descendants of early Dutch settlers who speak Afrikaans. The English students stuck together then. Not now, De Reuck said.

De Reuck said black and white students at the university can connect to Winfrey's personal story of early years of struggle and abuse, and find inspiration in her current success.Winfrey is a frequent visitor to South Africa, where she opened a school in 2007 dedicated to giving bright young women of all races opportunities in a society where they are handicapped by conservative traditions as well as the poor schools that are a legacy of apartheid. Her school's first class just graduated, overcoming early setbacks that included a scandal over a dormitory supervisor accused of trying to kiss and fondle students. The supervisor was acquitted of sexual assault charges last year. In a passage that the citation accompanying Winfrey's honorary doctorate, the 152nd awarded by the university, said Winfrey "has truly become a South African. She did so because she believed that there was important work to be done here, and she wanted to be part of what Nelson Mandela and others had begun.Previous recipients of Free State honorary degrees include anti apartheid icons Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Winfrey's visit overlapped with that of another famous Chicagoan Michelle Obama, wife of the U.S. president.

American television host, actress, producer, and philanthropist Orpah Gail Winfreyis, best known for her self-titled, multi-award winning talk show, which has become the highest-rated program of its kind in history and was nationally syndicated from 1986 to 2011.She has been ranked the richest African American of the 20th century,the greatest black philanthropist in American history,and was for a time the world's only black billionaire.She is also, according to some assessments, the most influential woman in the world.

Winfrey was born into poverty in rural Mississippi to a teenage single mother and later raised in an inner-city Milwaukee neighborhood. She experienced considerable hardship during her childhood, claiming to be raped at age nine and becoming pregnant at 14, her son died in infancy.Sent to live with the man she calls her father,a barber in Tennessee, Winfrey landed a job in radio while still in high school and began co-anchoring the local evening news at the age of 19. Her emotional ad-lib delivery eventually got her transferred to the daytime talk show arena,and after boosting a third rated local Chicago talk show to first place,she launched her own production company and became internationally syndicated.

Credited with creating a more intimate confessional form of media communication,she is thought to have popularized and revolutionized the tabloid talk show genre pioneered by Phil Donahue,which a Yale study claims broke 20th century taboos and allowed LGBT people to enter the mainstream.By the mid 1990s, she had reinvented her show with a focus on literature, self-improvement, and spirituality. Though criticized for unleashing confession culture, promoting controversial self-help ideas,and an emotion-centered approach,she is often praised for overcoming adversity to become a benefactor to others.From 2006 to 2008, her support of Barack Obama, by one estimate, delivered over a million votes in the close 2008 Democratic primary race.

Michael Joseph Jackson was an American recording artist, dancer, singer songwriter, musician, and philanthropist. Referred to as the King of Pop, Jackson is recognized as the most successful entertainer of all time by Guinness World Records. His contribution to music, dance, and fashion, along with a much publicized personal life, made him a global figure in popular culture for over four decades. On June 25, 2009, Jackson died while in his bed at his rented mansion at 100 North Carolwood Drive in the Holmby Hills district of Los Angeles. Attempts at resuscitating him by Conrad Murray, his personal physician, were unsuccessful. Jackson's death triggered a global outpouring of grief. The news spread quickly online, causing websites to slow down and crash from user overload. Both TMZ and the Los Angeles Times suffered outages. Google initially believed that the input from millions of people searching for "Michael Jackson" meant that the search engine was under DDoS attack. After his death, Jackson became the best selling albums artist of 2009 in the United States selling over 8.2 million albums in the U.S. and a total of 35 million albums worldwide in the 12 months that followed his death.

As long as there are appreciators of great music, Michael Jackson will continue to live on. He has grown to become larger than a phenomenon and more like myth. It is a shrine to the man who thanks to Elizabeth Taylor became known to the world as The King of Pop.  The site has a plethora of facts, lyrics, pictures, videos, merchandise, and just about anything else from Michael that a fan can dream of. Every song from Michael Jackson’s solo career and every one of his short films is available to listen to and watch for free.

What stood out to me is the amount of love that his fans showed to him, these are real fans. In the photo galleries are hand drawn and computer rendered pieces of art that are inspired by Michael, one of his songs, or recreations of him. They are crafted with the love that he tried to show everyone in the world through music that often contained messages of hope and inspirations to fight a struggle. Through most of Michael’s career he fought a struggle. A struggle deep from within that manifested itself in an ever changing face and a retreat into his inner child. That lifestyle garnered national attention, everyone raised an eyebrow… Except for a Michael Jackson fan. Quincy Jones once said that the one thing that every one of Michael’s songs were autobiographical. If there was any truth to this then the fans knew Michael through his music. The fans knew that there was no way possible Michael would ever do the things that he was accused of. This was the beginning of Michael’s fall from grace in the United States in the eyes of everyone… Except for a Michael Jackson fan.
A fan will view this as justice; I view it as a tragic irony, Evan Chandler committed suicide shortly after Michael’s death. Evan is the father of Jordan Chandler; the two of them together accused Michael of child molestation in 1993. It has been rumored a multitude of times that Jordan has openly admitted to people close to him that he was forced to go along with it and that nothing improper had ever actually taken place. Michael Jackson fans believe this. Michael was the type of artist that thrived off of being able to make others happy, once he fell from hard from fame, he felt he had lost everything, so he retreated. So did the nation, and again that excludes Michael Jackson fans. Since the release of the first posthumous album called Michael, there have been three new videos, oddly enough without Michael in them. The first was from the duet song Hold My Hand with Akon. The video featured Akon with historical clips of Michael. The second was from the song Hollywood Tonight and told an interesting story about a girl much like the one described in the song and the last just released is from the song Behind the Mask. The thing that these videos share in common is that they are feature either largely or completely consist of fans.