Credit: Far Out / Dolly Parton
Thu 13 August 2026 0:00, UK
Dolly Parton has gone through more eras of musical history than most people can keep count of at this point.
There are plenty of people who have seen her as a constant of country music, but her ability to work as a power player of the industry has made for some of the greatest slice-of-life stories to have ever come out of the country world. And yet, even with how many decades she has under her belt, she knew that there were some artists that she felt would never be replicated ever again.
Then again, she never claimed to want to copy any artist when she got started. There was a whole new world out there for her to explore every single time she made a new song, and even though there were plenty of artists that could hold their own next to her on the country charts, she only spoke with the greatest reverence about her favourite singers, be they George Jones, Johnny Cash, or Merle Haggard. Because Parton learned a long time ago that it was more important for her to be diplomatic.
She could have easily tried to talk trash every single time she made a new record, but she learned that there was no fun in trying to tear somebody down. Her career didn’t have to be defined by breaking down other people’s work, and some of the biggest pieces of her career usually came from when she was talking about the sunnier side of life. Even if there was competition, though, the clocks seemed to stop whenever Elvis Presley started performing for the first time.
Parton was coming from the country world, but there was something primal about the way that Presley shook his ass every time he got onstage. Most people didn’t know what to make of it at the time, but Parton knew that she was witnessing the beginnings of something different. Rock and roll had been around for a while, but Presley was the first one to give it a proper frontman, complete with some of the greatest dance moves anyone had ever seen.
That said, it’s not like Parton ever had the best relationship with Presley. His management team knew what they wanted every single time they worked on a record, but Parton refused to let them go anywhere near a song like ‘I Will Always Love You’ if that meant them trying to seize the copyright of her song.
Her songs were everything to her, and even if Presley did throw a wrench in things, it’s not like she was going to ignore the raw talent that he had every time he sang, saying, “I always felt that we were kin. I feel like I know exactly how he was. Every time he’d come in town, even if I was home, I just wouldn’t go, somethin’ always kept me from goin’. People realised that he was not a god of any sort, but he was just an extraordinary human bein’. I don’t think [having another Elvis] will be soon, I don’t think it will be anythin’ you and me will ever see.”
Further reading: From The Vault
And it’s not like Parton was ever wrong, either. The closest thing that we had to another version of Presley was probably Michael Jackson, and while his cult of personality skyrocketed further than anyone imagined, Presley was still the poster child for what a larger-than-life singer was always supposed to look, sound, and perform like whenever he broke out the karate moves or brought the house down with a song like ‘Jailhouse Rock’.
His music was the sound of what someone could do when they were completely uninhibited, and every one of those tracks is a document of what he could do. Parton could only look on from afar most of the time, but she didn’t have a problem calling him one of the greatest performers that she had ever seen.
