Dolly Parton:2011 "Better Day World Tour,"scheduled.

After three years without touring, Dolly Parton has just announced the 2011 "Better Day World Tour," scheduled to kick off this July in her native Tennessee and hit arenas and theaters across the U.S., Northern Europe and Australia.

The U.S. and European dates have already been published, with the Australian dates expected to follow shortly. Her 2007 and 2008 European tours cemented Parton's status as Europe's most successful country artist, and she will perform no fewer than 18 shows in the British Isles and Scandinavia this time around.

The tour will follow the release of Dolly's upcoming album entitled, not surprisingly, "Better Day". It will be the fourth release on her own label, Dolly Records, which was started in 2008 and has produced an album a year from the country superstar.

Parton has been inspiring people with her music for over 40 years now, charting more than 25 No. 1 singles over her long career, and she hopes her latest release will provide even more inspiration. As she explains in a press release, "times are hard all over. I think people need to feel better and I thought "Better Day" was the perfect title because it says 'hope.'"

In that spirit, proceeds from the tour's first show in Knoxville will go to benefit Parton's Dollywood Foundation, specifically her Imagination Library program, which promotes the importance of reading to children in the first five years of life by providing each child in a participating community with one book a month until the age of five. To date the Imagination Library has distributed 33 million books to over 1,200 communities in the U.S., Canada, and the United Kingdom.