Carrie Underwood STUNS The Entire World With Her Tribute To Dolly Parton.
Inside the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, a theater is full.
The show is going out live across America on ABC.
Two months earlier, Dolly Parton had died.
She was eighty years old.
Tonight, the Country Music Association is giving her a celebration of her own.
For two hours, singer after singer has walked onto this stage to sing one of her songs.
Now the night is almost over.
There is one song left.
A woman walks out alone.
She is wearing a flowing white gown.
Good Morning America said it was covered in a delicate butterfly pattern for the woman who loved butterflies.
She starts to sing a song that Dolly wrote in 1973 for a man she was leaving.
The song is “I Will Always Love You.”
Near the end, the stage begins to fill.
The other performers of the night come out to stand with her.
Reba McEntire is among them.
They join her for the last chorus, all of them singing Dolly’s song together.
The song ends, and the theater fills with applause and then with cheering.
You know this woman.
Twenty-one years ago, she was a farm girl from a small town in Oklahoma standing on a television stage, hoping America would vote for her.
Her name is Carrie Underwood.
She is forty-three years old.
And on this night, in front of the biggest stars in Nashville and everyone watching at home, she was given the last song of the night.
She was asked to sing the most famous song Dolly Parton ever wrote as the very last word of Dolly’s own farewell.
There are songs a singer chooses and there are songs that choose the moment.
“I Will Always Love You” is a song Dolly wrote to say goodbye.
It carried her away from the man who made her famous.
It became a number one record twice in her own voice.
It became one of the biggest records in the history of popular music in someone else’s.
And Dolly turned down Elvis Presley rather than give away half of it.
For more than fifty years, it was her song.
Carrie Underwood knew it well.
She had sung it beside Dolly in 2009.
She had sung it for Dolly with Dolly in the room in 2016.
The special itself was named after it.
Every performer that night sang under its title, and whoever sang it last would be singing it as the final word of Dolly’s own celebration two months after she was gone.
On this night, it had to be someone else’s.
And the woman who sang it had once told a television audience that if she could be anyone else in the world, she would be Dolly Parton.
This is the story of that performance, what happened on that stage, why so many people were moved by it, and how a farm girl from Oklahoma came to be standing in Dolly Parton’s light singing Dolly Parton’s goodbye.
The special had a long name.
The Country Music Association presents I Will Always Love You: A Celebration of Dolly Parton.
It was not an award show.
Nobody would win anything.
American Songwriter wrote that the night would be about Dolly’s life, her legacy, and her love.
The Country Music Association put it together with ABC as a gift to the woman who had given country music so much.
It went out live on the evening of Wednesday, the twenty-first of October, on ABC and on Disney+ at the same time, both here in the United States and in other countries around the world.
The next day, it went up on Hulu for anyone who missed it.
Fans could buy tickets and sit in the theater.
Everyone else could watch from home.
The place they chose meant something.
Belmont University sits in the heart of Nashville, a Christian university that Dolly had close ties with.
In 2025, it hosted the first-ever performance of Dolly: A True Original Musical, the stage show about her life.
The university even runs a program called Dolly U, where students learn about her career, her artistry, and the business she built.
The country music website Holler described the night as a tribute to Dolly’s work as a country star, a philanthropist, and a humanitarian.
The money raised by the night went to Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, the program she started to put free books into the hands of small children.
Belmont and the Country Music Association promised a donation from the proceeds.
Disney gave its support as well.
The head of the Country Music Association, Sarah Trahern, said that honoring Dolly’s legacy was not just an opportunity.
She said it was their responsibility.
The producers called on nearly two dozen artists.
Reba McEntire, Vince Gill, Lainey Wilson, Ella Langley, Kelsea Ballerini, Darius Rucker, Little Big Town, Lady A, Brad Paisley, Zac Brown, Ashley McBryde, Carly Pearce.
The bluegrass players Ricky Skaggs, Molly Tuttle, Sierra Hull, and Béla Fleck.
Kristin Chenoweth, Kristen Bell, Lukas Nelson, Amy Grant, Kimberly Williams-Paisley, a student choir from Belmont itself.
American Songwriter described the lineup as several generations of country music, from Carrie Underwood and Lainey Wilson to Vince Gill and Reba.
Those stars, the magazine said, had grown up hearing Dolly on the radio.
Before the show, the stars walked a red carpet outside.
Good Morning America’s Lara Spencer reported the next day that the carpet was sparkling in honor of Dolly’s love of rhinestones.
The women of Little Big Town came in outfits that channeled Dolly’s coat of many colors.
Reba came in emerald green.
Katy Perry, Spencer said, had flown in because she did not want to miss it.
But the accessory of the night, Spencer reported, was the butterfly.
Dolly loved butterflies.
She once said that they do not sting or bite, that they are just beautiful creatures.
And on that carpet, nearly everyone wore one.
Ella Langley had a sparkling butterfly on the front of her dress.
Lainey Wilson had them on her bell-bottoms.
Kelsea Ballerini said her sleeves were meant to look like butterfly wings.
And Carrie Underwood arrived in a gown covered in a delicate butterfly pattern.
The answer came at the very end.
The writer behind the country music website Saving Country Music, who reviewed the special the next day, said plainly that they did not know it would be Carrie Underwood.
Then the writer added that it made total sense the moment she walked out on stage.
She was the closer, the last performer of the night.
Every other song had led up to hers.
For two months, the song had been everywhere.
After Dolly died, singer after singer had reached for it.
Parade magazine listed Brandi Carlile, Kacey Musgraves, Orville Peck, and John Mayer among those who had sung it in her memory.
So the bar was high.
Carrie herself had said only weeks earlier that Dolly was the bar.
She said Dolly had set it at its highest and that the rest of them would never live up to it.
Parade wrote that she sang Dolly’s ballad from 1974.
She sang it as a country song.
Parade reported that fans online called her the perfect choice to sing the original country version of the song.
One fan praised the way she captured Dolly’s own style of singing it.
Others called the performance absolutely breathtaking and said she had the voice of an angel.
In the clip the Country Music Association released, she makes no speech.
She says nothing of her own.
She simply sings the song.
Then near the end, the other performers came out to join her.
Saving Country Music reported that Carrie was joined by Reba and the rest of the performers for the final portion of the celebration.
The people who had spent the night honoring Dolly were now on the stage with her.
Reba, who had spoken early in the evening about Dolly’s heart and her faith, was now standing with Carrie at the close of it, singing the last chorus with everyone else.
Everything Nash, which called it a stunning performance, reported that all of the other artists joined her to sing the final chorus together.
Parade wrote that it brought the broadcast to an emotional close.
The next morning, the Today Show summed it up in one line.
There was only one way to close out the night, the show said, and that was Carrie Underwood singing the Dolly classic with all the night’s musicians joining in.
The clip released by the Country Music Association that night ends with the song finished and the sound of the theater.
First applause, then cheering.
The Saving Country Music review said that along with Reba McEntire’s performance, it was a highlight of the night.
The Country Music Association put the video of her performance on YouTube that same night.
Within two days, it had been watched more than 300,000 times.
The association posted many of the night’s other performances, too.
Two days on, Reba’s “He’s Alive” had been watched about 212,000 times.
Brad Paisley’s, Ashley McBryde’s, and Lukas Nelson and Lainey Wilson’s had each been watched around 100,000 times.
Carrie’s was ahead of every one of them.
Under it, hundreds of people left messages.
One viewer wrote that it was strange to miss someone they had never met.
Another wrote that Dolly would be so proud and that the song had made them smile and cry at the same time.
Another wrote that they had thought they were through crying.
Another wrote that Carrie had hit a grand slam and that Dolly was smiling.
One viewer who had watched the whole program wrote of being deeply moved when all the performers came out on the stage.
And another who said they did not even listen to country music wrote that they had tuned in anyway and that it had touched them.
It came at the very end of a two-hour night that had already held nearly twenty performances and tributes.
By then the audience had heard “Jolene,” “Coat of Many Colors,” “Islands in the Stream,” and “He’s Alive.”
And still, it was the last song that the Today Show, Parade, and Everything Nash all singled out the next day.
That was the moment.
Three minutes on a stage in Nashville, a dress full of butterflies, a song from 1973, a stage full of stars behind one woman, and a theater full of people cheering in front of her.
To understand why it hit so hard, you have to go back two months.
And then you have to go back more than fifty years.
Dolly Parton died on the twenty-fifth of August, 2026.
She was eighty years old.
Her family said that she had passed after a brief battle with cancer.
She was laid to rest that Friday at a private funeral at Woodlawn Memorial Park and Mausoleum in Nashville beside her husband Carl Dean.
They had married on the thirtieth of May, 1966, in Ringgold, Georgia.
He died on the third of March, 2025, at the age of eighty-two.
She outlived him by less than eighteen months.
In the days that followed, singers answered the way they knew best.
They sang her songs.
Within a day, Carrie Underwood posted a tribute on Instagram to the woman the website Everything Nash would later call her musical hero.
American Songwriter reported that she shared a collage of photographs and she wrote that Dolly was not gone because Carrie knew exactly where she was.
She wrote that Dolly was the epitome of faith, grace, talent, beauty, and humor.
That she had a humble heart for Jesus and made everyone around her feel special.
She said that Dolly was probably the one person on planet Earth that everyone loved and could agree on.
That she was one of one and no one would ever come close.
She said it was all right to be sad that the world had lost a legend because heaven had gained an angel.
And she closed with a line of scripture turned into a farewell.
“Well done, good and faithful Dolly. Welcome home.”
Days later, on the last weekend of August, Carrie took the stage at Tanglewood, the famous outdoor music center in Lenox, Massachusetts.
It was her first time playing there.
American Songwriter reported that she wore a custom jacket with her initials embroidered on the back.
Fox News reported that she was overcome with emotion that night as she spoke about Dolly.
American Songwriter reported that she told the crowd she wanted to pour her love out for her.
She told the crowd that Dolly had been a huge influence on so many of them and was just one of the nicest people she had ever met.
She said the news had been such a shock that the whole world could feel the ripples.
American Songwriter reported that she said it was as if time had stood still.
She pointed one finger toward the sky.
She said she knew where Dolly was and she knew how much Dolly loved Jesus.
She called Dolly one who transcends all space and all time.
She said that Dolly was gone but not forgotten and that she would always be with them as long as she lived in their heads and their hearts.
Then she asked everyone to take out their phones and light the place up for Dolly, and she sang a song of her own, “See You Again,” and dedicated it to her.
In early September, American Songwriter reported more of her words given to her record label.
She said Dolly was the perfect example of how to be an incredible artist, songwriter, and performer.
The kind of person everybody loved and respected who always handled herself with grace.
She said Dolly would always be an example to the rest of them.
She said there would never be anyone like Dolly.
She said Dolly could be commanding and in control and also the sweetest human, that she would always let people know what she thought, but in the nicest way, that she was a kind human in the middle of megastardom.
So when Carrie Underwood walked out at Belmont seven weeks later, she had been saying goodbye to Dolly in public since the day the news came.
The song she sang that night was born out of a goodbye of a different kind.
In 1967, a young singer from the Smoky Mountains joined the television show of one of the biggest stars in country music, Porter Wagoner.
Dolly was twenty-one years old.
Parade notes that she and Porter went on to release thirteen albums of duets together and won the Country Music Association Award for Vocal Duo of the Year three times.
She would stay on that show until the middle of 1974.
Dolly later told the cable channel Country Music Television that she had promised Porter five years.
She stayed for seven.
By then, she wanted to go out on her own.
She said the two of them argued again and again.
So instead of arguing one more time, she went home and wrote a song.
She said she wrote it out of a very emotional place inside her at that time.
The next morning, she took the song back to Porter and she sang it to him.
Dolly said that Porter cried.
He told her it was the prettiest song he had ever heard, and he told her she could leave as long as he could produce the record.
That was the bargain as Dolly told it.
Years later, she would say that if it had not been for Porter, she never would have written that song.
She called it her goodbye song to Porter.
She recorded it on the twelfth of June, 1973, at the famous Studio B in Nashville.
Dolly has explained that she wrote it within a few days of another song of hers, “Jolene,” and that the early recordings of both ended up on the same cassette tape.
“I Will Always Love You” came out in March of 1974.
In June of 1974, it went to number one on the Billboard Country chart.
By the middle of that year, she had left Porter’s show for good.
The next year, the Country Music Association named Dolly its Female Vocalist of the Year.
Then came the phone call.
After the song reached number one, word came that Elvis Presley wanted to record it.
Dolly was interested.
But the night before the recording session, Elvis’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker, called.
Dolly told the story on BBC Radio 2.
She said the Colonel explained that they did not record anything with Elvis unless they had the publishing on it, or at least half of the publishing.
Dolly said no.
She said it was the most important copyright in her whole publishing company and she could not do it.
She told them she was really sorry.
Then she said she cried all night.
People around her told her she was crazy turning down Elvis Presley, but she went with what her heart told her.
In one telling of the story, she said that something in her heart simply told her not to do it.
She was a young woman not long out on her own, saying no to Elvis Presley and his manager, and she did it to keep hold of a song she had written about leaving.
Elvis never recorded it.
Eight years later, Dolly recorded the song again, this time for a Hollywood film, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.
It came out on the twelfth of July, 1982.
It went to number one on the country chart again and to number one on the country chart in Canada too.
In the Netherlands, it reached number two.
With that, Dolly became the only artist ever to take two different recordings of the same song to number one on the country chart.
Then in 1992, Whitney Houston recorded it for the film The Bodyguard.
Her version spent fourteen weeks at number one on the Billboard pop chart, a record at the time.
It became the bestselling single ever by a woman singing on her own, with more than twenty-four million copies sold around the world.
It was the bestselling single on Earth in 1992.
On the chart for all of Europe, it stayed at number one for thirteen weeks.
Dolly told Country Music Television that the first time she heard it, it came on her car radio.
She said she about had a fit.
The record won the Grammy for Record of the Year in 1994, and Dolly has said publicly that she liked Whitney’s version better than her own.
Dolly had suggested more than once that the soul singer Patti LaBelle record the song because she felt Patti could sing it so well.
Patti kept putting it off.
After she heard Whitney’s record, she deeply regretted it.
And Dolly told BBC Radio 2 that when Whitney’s record came out, she made enough money to buy Graceland.
The song Elvis could not have because Dolly would not hand over half of it ended up earning her a fortune.
All because she trusted her heart one long night in the 1970s.
In 1995, she sang it again as a duet with Vince Gill.
They sang it on the Grand Ole Opry on the twenty-sixth of August.
The performance went out on cable television and radio stations began playing it before it was ever released.
It reached the top twenty of the country chart.
They performed it together on the stage of the Country Music Association Awards and it was named the Vocal Event of the Year.
Vince has said that the last note they sang together that night was one of the most beautiful sounds he had ever heard.
In 2007, Parade reported Dolly sang it once more for Porter Wagoner himself on the Grand Ole Opry to mark his fifty years as a member.
In 2020, the Library of Congress added her original recording to the National Recording Registry, the list of sound recordings the nation chooses to preserve forever.
In 2021, Rolling Stone ranked it number ninety-four among the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.
The song has been played on radio and television more than ten million times by the count of the music licensing group that tracks it.
And after Dolly died, her original recording from 1974 entered the Billboard pop chart at number twenty-seven.
Fifty-two years after it was made.
In the weeks that followed, the song was everywhere.
Vince Gill sang it in Kansas City.
Brandi Carlile, Kacey Musgraves, Orville Peck, and John Mayer sang it on their own stages.
So by the time the Country Music Association planned its celebration, the song was no longer simply a famous old record.
It had become one of the ways people everywhere were saying goodbye to her.
The woman who sang it at Belmont was born on the tenth of March, 1983, in Muskogee, Oklahoma.
She grew up on her parents’ farm in the small town of Checotah.
She tried out for the fourth season of a television singing contest called American Idol.
On the twenty-fifth of May, 2005, America voted her the winner.
She was twenty-two years old.
Her first single, “Inside Your Heaven,” went straight to number one on the Billboard pop chart.
Then came “Jesus, Take the Wheel,” which went to number one on the country chart and reached number twenty on the pop chart too.
In March of 2008, Randy Travis invited her to join the Grand Ole Opry.
On the tenth of May, 2008, Garth Brooks inducted her as a member.
That same year, she began hosting the Country Music Association Awards with Brad Paisley.
By 2017, they had hosted the show together ten years in a row, and they were back again in 2018.
She has won eight Grammy Awards.
In 2009, her album Play On went to number one on the country album chart and on the main Billboard album chart for music of every kind.
It sold more than 318,000 copies in its first week.
A few months later, she was acting in a television comedy, How I Met Your Mother.
In 2010, she married the hockey player Mike Fisher.
They have two children, and in 2025, she came full circle.
She returned to American Idol, the show that made her, as a judge, a farm girl from Oklahoma who became one of the biggest voices in modern country music.
And there was one woman she had once said she would most like to be.
The first time the two names were tied together on a big stage was December 2006.
That year, Dolly Parton received the Kennedy Center Honors in Washington, the national honor given each year for a lifetime in the arts.
Stars came to Washington to sing her songs in her honor.
Carrie Underwood was one of them.
About a year and a half after winning American Idol, she sang “Islands in the Stream” with Kenny Rogers, the man who had sung it with Dolly in the first place.
But the two women did not truly meet until three years later.
In December 2009, Carrie hosted her own holiday special on Fox, taped in Los Angeles that fall.
The guests included Brad Paisley, David Cook, Ryan Seacrest, and Neil Patrick Harris, and Dolly Parton.
The Associated Press reported that Carrie said she had never met Dolly before they worked on that show, and the two of them hit it off right away.
Once they discovered they lived close to each other back home, Carrie passed along Dolly’s invitation.
She said Dolly told her that she did not live far away and they should get together.
Dolly asked if she liked Southern cooking.
And then Dolly told her she did not look like she eats.
On that special, Carrie dressed up as Dolly in a towering blonde wig and a skintight gold suit to introduce her.
Rolling Stone reported that she told the audience that if she could be anyone else in the world, she would be Dolly Parton.
Dolly talked about a musical she hoped to make from her life story.
Then the two of them sang a song together.
It was “I Will Always Love You.”
Seven years later, the song brought them together again.
On the second of November, 2016, Dolly received the Willie Nelson Lifetime Achievement Award at the Country Music Association Awards.
Her friends sang her a medley.
Jennifer Nettles and Pentatonix opened with “Jolene.”
Reba sang “9 to 5.”
Kacey Musgraves sang “Here You Come Again.”
And Carrie Underwood and Martina McBride sang “I Will Always Love You” with the others joining in.
Before Dolly came up to accept, Reba told her that they loved her to pieces.
Then Dolly took the stage and gave a short speech of thanks.
Seven years after their first duet, Carrie was singing Dolly’s goodbye song to Dolly’s face at the biggest awards night in country music.
That same year, Carrie was one of thirty artists who recorded “Forever Country,” a medley celebrating fifty years of the Country Music Association Awards.
“I Will Always Love You” was part of it.
The record went straight to number one on the country chart.
Then came the night the three of them ran the whole show.
On Wednesday the thirteenth of November, 2019, Carrie Underwood hosted the Country Music Association Awards, and her special guest hosts were Reba McEntire and Dolly Parton.
The night was built around the women of country music.
Before the show, Carrie told Country Now that it did not get bigger than that or better than that.
She said her two guest hosts would be driving the bus for the evening and setting the tone.
She said she had been very pleased and excited to hear what the Country Music Association wanted to do with that year’s show.
She said they just wanted to be respectful of their genre and of the awards show and that it was going to be a wonderful night.
The three of them opened the night by singing together.
The song was “Those Memories of You,” a song Dolly had recorded in 1987 with Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris on their album Trio.
Right after them came a medley of nearly nine minutes.
The women of country music one after another.
Terri Clark, Sara Evans, Crystal Gayle, Martina McBride, Jennifer Nettles, Tanya Tucker singing her own “Delta Dawn,” Gretchen Wilson, The Highwomen.
Martina McBride closed the medley with her song “Independence Day.”
A review in a national newspaper said that the easy banter between the three hosts went over better than the scripted jokes.
Thirteen years after the Kennedy Center, ten years after the holiday special, three generations of country music on one stage, and Carrie Underwood, the youngest of the three, standing between two legends.
So when the Country Music Association needed one voice to close Dolly’s farewell, the choice was not a stranger.
It was a woman who had sung that song with Dolly herself and sung it for her more than once.
The two hours before Carrie’s song were full of moments of their own.
According to the Saving Country Music review, the night opened with Vince Gill, Molly Tuttle, Ricky Skaggs, and Béla Fleck playing the bluegrass song “A Few Old Memories.”
It was fitting that Vince went first.
He and Dolly had sung “I Will Always Love You” together on the Country Music Association Awards in 1995.
And he has said the last note they sang that night was one of the most beautiful sounds he ever heard.
In January of 2026, he sang it on the Grand Ole Opry for her eightieth birthday.
And two days after she died, on the twenty-seventh of August, he sang it again at the Midland Theater in Kansas City.
He told the audience his family was crushed.
Tears broke into the song and the people in the seats sang along to help him through it.
Now, eight weeks later, he was opening her celebration.
Then Reba McEntire came out and spoke.
The Today Show replayed her words the next morning and called it a heartfelt speech from Dolly’s good friend.
Reba said the night was a celebration of Dolly’s heart, her kindness, her generosity, her faith, and her humor.
And she said, “Dolly always seemed to understand that the greatest thing you can be in this world is exactly who God made you to be.”
A film of Dolly’s life followed.
Lainey Wilson sang “Train, Train” with a bluegrass band.
In January, she and Vince had sung together on the Grand Ole Opry for Dolly’s eightieth birthday.
Ashley McBryde sang “Coat of Many Colors.”
Katy Perry spoke in Dolly’s memory.
Ella Langley sang “Jolene.”
Kelsea Ballerini sang “Here You Come Again.”
Darius Rucker sang “Two Doors Down,” introduced by Little Big Town.
Carly Pearce sang with Kristin Chenoweth.
That pairing had its own history.
Back in 2009 on Carrie’s holiday special, Dolly had said she hoped Kristin Chenoweth would one day star in a musical about her life.
And in 2019, Kristin and Dolly released their own duet of “I Will Always Love You.”
Kristin said it was a song she had loved since she was a child.
Recorded tributes came from friends far beyond country music.
Julia Roberts, Oprah Winfrey, Bono, Barbara Mandrell, Carol Burnett.
Lady A sang “Islands in the Stream.”
Lukas Nelson and Lainey Wilson sang “You Can’t Make Old Friends.”
Little Big Town sang “Light of a Clear Blue Morning.”
Amy Grant spoke about Dolly’s faith.
Then Reba McEntire sang “He’s Alive,” a gospel song Dolly recorded in 1989.
Behind her stood a choir of singers from Belmont University itself.
Saving Country Music reported that the whole capacity crowd stood up for it, one of the few standing ovations of the night.
Lara Spencer of Good Morning America said the next morning that it had to be one of the moments of the night and that the young singers wowed the crowd.
The next morning, one of those young Belmont singers told Good Morning America that it had been surreal and that the standing ovation lifted all of them.
Zac Brown sang “Butterfly” with Dolly’s own recorded voice playing alongside him, so that for a few minutes she sang at her own tribute.
Then Brad Paisley and Sierra Hull sang “When I Get Where I’m Going,” a song Dolly had once sung with Brad on his own record back in 2005.
Everything Nash quoted Brad calling her a singular force in Nashville and in every kind of music, a country singer at the core and one of the greatest artists and human beings we have ever seen.
And then came Carrie.
Not every critic loved every minute.
The same Saving Country Music review said the middle of the night sagged and that some songs were sung in lower keys that took away some of their power.
The reviewer also named other singers who might have done some of the songs more justice.
Some readers commenting under the review complained about the sound on the broadcast, but the review was clear about how the night ended.
It called the start and the finish of the show among its best moments, and it named the closing song a highlight of the night.
The woman they were all singing for was born on the nineteenth of January, 1946, in a one-room cabin near the Little Pigeon River at Pittman Center, Tennessee.
She was the fourth of twelve children.
From that cabin, she became one of the most famous women in the world.
Her sister Stella has said that Dolly wrote three or four thousand songs in her life.
She won eleven Grammy Awards.
She entered the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1999.
She received the Kennedy Center Honors in 2006.
On the fifth of November, 2022, she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
She starred in the film 9 to 5 in 1980 alongside Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin.
The film took in more than $103 million.
Its title song went to number one on the country chart and the pop chart in early 1981 and was nominated for an Academy Award.
But of everything she built, the thing that night was raising money for may be the most lasting.
In 1995, Dolly started the Imagination Library in Sevier County, Tennessee, the county where she grew up.
The idea was simple.
Every child from birth to the age of five would get a free book in the mail every month, no matter how much money their family had.
It began through the Dollywood Foundation in one county.
It grew far beyond Tennessee.
It reached Canada in 2006 and Britain in 2007.
Australia followed in 2013 and Ireland in 2019.
In 2016, it was mailing one million books a month.
By 2022, it was sending out two million books every single month.
In 2023, it gave away its 200 millionth book.
So the proceeds of that night in Nashville went back to the program that carries her name.
Books for children, mailed free every month.
Fifty-three years ago, a young woman sat down and wrote a song because she could not find another way to say goodbye.
The man she wrote it for cried when he heard it.
The king of rock and roll wanted it, and she would not give up half of it.
A pop star sang it to the whole world, and Dolly sang it herself again and again over the years.
Carrie Underwood’s own road ran right alongside it.
In 2006, a year and a half out of American Idol, she sang for Dolly at the Kennedy Center Honors.
In 2009, she met her for the first time, dressed up as her for a laugh, told a television audience that Dolly was the one person she would most like to be, and then sang this very song with her side by side.
In 2016, she sang it for Dolly again at the Country Music Association Awards, the night Dolly received her lifetime award.
In 2019, she stood beside Dolly and Reba and ran the biggest night in country music with them.
And in the weeks after the news came in 2026, she wrote that Dolly was not gone.
She told a crowd in Massachusetts that Dolly transcends all space and all time.
She said Dolly was the bar set at its highest.
Then on a Wednesday night in October, two months after Dolly was gone, a farm girl from Oklahoma walked out in a white gown covered in butterflies and sang it back to her.
She sang it the way Dolly sang it, as a country song.
Behind her, the stars of Nashville came out to sing the last chorus with her.
In front of her, a theater full of people filled the room with applause and cheering.
Carrie Underwood had said back in August that Dolly was not gone, that she knew exactly where Dolly was.
Two months later in Nashville, she sang Dolly’s goodbye song back to her, and the whole cast of the night sang it with her.
