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Dolly Parton made her first public and in-person appearance of 2026 on Friday, sporting her signature blonde bouffant and a big smile on her face.
When taking the stage at Dollywood in Tennessee to celebrate the theme park’s 41st season, the country icon said, “I’ve been doing a whole lot of things. I have been not touring, as you know, I’ve had a few little health issues, and we’re taking good care of them.” Parton postponed her Las Vegas concerts toward the end of 2025 to undergo unspecified procedures to address health concerns. The postponements arrived months after the death of her husband, Carl Dean, at the age of 82. The couple had been married for nearly six decades.
“I just kind of got wore down and wore out, grieving over Carl and lot of other little things going on,” continued Parton. “I needed to build myself back up, spiritually, emotionally and physically. But all is good. It didn’t slow me down,” she said, before momentarily becoming distracted by a stray hair and joking, “I’m back to normal.”
When speaking about Dean, who she has lovingly praised during interviews throughout her career, Parton said, “I don’t think I’ll ever be married. I think Carl Dean’s waiting for me on the other side. And if I should show up at the pearly gates with somebody else, he would not like that. He’d be saying, ‘Who’s that little pisser? You leave him outside the gates, and if the Lord wants him in, he’ll bring him. You get on in here with me!’”
Parton and Dean’s 50th wedding anniversary helped inspire the musician’s 2016 album of love songs, Pure & Simple. “I was just trying to think about all the different colors of love through the years,” Parton told Rolling Stone at the time. “I thought, ‘Well, I’m going to write about mine and Carl’s relationship. It’s just a pure and simple relationship,’ so it started with that and then I thought, ‘Well why don’t I just write a whole album of love songs?’”
On Friday, Parton also shared that she has been rewriting songs for her upcoming Broadway musical, which is slated to launch this fall in New York. When asked by an audience member if there’s one piece of advice she lives by, Parton replied, “Never forget who you are, never forget where you came from, and always kind of go back home. You can always go back home in your heart and in your mind.”
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