Burnsville Bruins

08/31/2026

It was never a secret… Merle Haggard adored Dolly Parton.
While they were out on the road together in the mid-70s, The Hag fell hard. So hard he sat down and wrote one of the most honest songs of his career about her — “Always Wanting You.”
Then, in true Merle fashion, he dialled her number at 3 o’clock in the morning and sang it to her over the phone.
Dolly was already married to Carl and gently let him down… but the song still became a No. 1 hit.
You can hear every bit of that longing in his voice.
They never recorded a proper duet together, and Dolly later said she always regretted that.
But the feelings were real, the friendship was real, and the song remains one of the purest pieces of country truth ever written.
Two legends.
One unrequited love.
And a three-in-the-morning phone call that turned into a classic.
Rest easy, Merle.
Rest easy, Dolly.
Somewhere up there, maybe he’s finally finished that story.

08/31/2026

What began as a planned celebration of Dolly has now become an especially emotional tribute to her legacy. The maze at All Seasons Orchard took nearly three years to develop and features Dolly’s famous smile and hair alongside the words “An American Treasure.” Even more meaningful is where the money is going, because Dolly founded the Imagination Library in 1995 after being inspired by her father, who could not read or write. The program went on to place hundreds of millions of books into children’s hands, so every family walking through this field is helping a piece of the work she cared so deeply about continue.

08/31/2026

Purdue "All American" Marching Band

08/31/2026

Brad Paisley is honoring Dolly Parton with a heartfelt tribute to the country legend, looking back on their special bond and the song they shared, “When I Get Where I’m Going.”

08/31/2026

Dolly is back with the two people who made that song possible.

Her mother, Avie Lee, sewed the real coat out of rags when Dolly was six or seven and had nothing to wear that winter. The children at school laughed at her for it. So her mama sat her down and told her about Joseph and his coat in the Bible, and Dolly decided that made it something special.

She wrote more than 3,000 songs in her life and always said that one was her favorite.

Lee went in 2000, and Avie Lee three years after. Her mother was 80. Dolly was, too.

08/31/2026

Vince Gill tried to sing "I Will Always Love You" for Dolly on Thursday night, but couldn't get through it alone.

He was at the Midland Theatre in Kansas City, two days after she died. The tears came quick and interrupted the music, so the crowd started singing the parts he could not.

This is the man who wrote "Go Rest High on That Mountain," the song country music buries its own people with. He broke down singing it at George Jones' memorial in 2013, too.

He and Dolly cut a duet of that song in 1995.

08/31/2026

Go rest high, Dolly. You earned it about a hundred times over.

She wrote thousands of songs across sixty years. "Jolene" and "I Will Always Love You" came out of the same afternoon in 1973, which is a thing almost nobody in music has ever done.

Then there is everything that had nothing to do with music. The Imagination Library has put more than 200 million books in children's hands since 1995. She built Dollywood in the county she grew up poor in and gave that whole town work. She raised nine million dollars for Tennessee wildfire victims in 2016.

And she never once used any of it to divide anybody.

08/31/2026

08/31/2026

One of my favorite Dolly stories has almost nothing to do with one particular song.

In 2022, Dolly Parton was nominated for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and her first reaction was basically, “I don’t think I’ve earned that.”

Think about that for a second.

Dolly Parton. Decades into a career most people couldn’t duplicate with three lifetimes, looking at another huge honor and worrying that she hadn’t done enough to deserve it.

She even tried to withdraw her name from consideration because she didn’t consider herself a rock artist.

They kept her on the ballot. She got elected anyway.

And this is the part I love.

She didn’t just shrug and put another trophy on the shelf.

She decided if the world was going to call her a rock star, she better go make a damn rock album.

So at an age when nobody would have blamed her for coasting on everything she had already accomplished, she went back to work.

The result was Rockstar — 30 songs, including originals and rock classics, with people like Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Elton John, Stevie Nicks, Joan Jett, Sting and plenty more.

And the thing went to No. 1 on Billboard’s Top Album Sales chart.

There’s something incredibly human about that story to me.

Most of us will never have to worry about whether we belong in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. But I think most of us know what it feels like to walk into a room, get an opportunity, start a new job, try something completely different or have somebody believe in us and quietly wonder:

“Am I actually good enough to be here?”

Dolly’s answer wasn’t a speech about believing in yourself.

It was to get to work.

Maybe that’s part of why so many people loved her. Underneath all the rhinestones, jokes and larger-than-life personality was somebody who apparently never decided she had done enough.

They called her a rock star.

So she went and became one.

08/31/2026

Lee Parton never learned to read, and Dolly said he carried some shame about it his whole life.

He was a sharecropper and a to***co farmer who took construction work to feed twelve children. He could work, but he could not read the paper.

So in 1995, his daughter started mailing free books to the children in Sevier County, where they came up. A book a month from the day a child is born until they turn five.

It reaches one in six children in this country under five now, and four other countries besides.

He died in 2000. He got to see it working.