Dolly Parton's First Song Since Her Death Just Dropped

Dolly Parton's voice turned up on a brand new recording Wednesday, Sept. 9, two weeks after her death. The song is "Bound to Ride," credited to Dolly Parton & The First Ladies of Bluegrass, and it is the first music released under her name since she died Aug. 25 at age 80.

It sits second on the track list of Where the Soul Never Dies: Celebrating 80 Years of The Stanley Brothers, a 12-song tribute album due Oct. 16 on Compass Records. Rolling Stone premiered the track.

Parton's reps confirmed she died following a "brief battle with cancer." The specific type was not revealed. She was 80, and she died in Nashville, Tennessee.

She sang her part alone, around 2022

Almost every track on the album was cut live in the studio, with the players in one room feeding off each other. Parton got the exception. During a Covid surge circa 2022, she was taking no chances, so she recorded her vocal by herself at her own studio.

The music came first. The group known as the First Ladies of Bluegrass laid down a backing track on their own and sent it to her: Alison Brown on banjo, Becky Buller on fiddle, Sierra Hull on mandolin, Missy Raines on bass and Molly Tuttle on guitar. The band rearranged "Bound to Ride" while masked around a studio coffee table, adding a newly written eight-bar bridge pulled from an obscure verse. Buller sang a scratch vocal in the band's best guess at Parton's key, since nobody could ask her in person.

The Stanley Brothers helped popularize the traditional song with a 1964 recording.

What she sent back caught the producers off guard

Parton did not just sing the melody. She called out each of the First Ladies of Bluegrass by name as they took their solos, and tossed in ad libs including "Pick it girls!" The musicians were deeply moved when they heard it.

Producer Garry West described the reaction to Rolling Stone. "I call it the full Dolly," he said. "We didn't know what we would get back, and she really did over-deliver. We were shocked. We couldn't have gotten anything better."

A husband-and-wife team produced all 12 tracks

West and Brown are married and run Compass Records together. He plays bass, she plays banjo, and they produced every song on the record themselves at their Nashville headquarters, the former Glaser Brothers studio, the building where outlaw country got its name.

Brown's banjo shows up on most of the album. Asked about that, she joked to Rolling Stone, "I'm the best in my price range."

The project started elsewhere. Industry veteran J. Tayloe Emery came up with it alongside Ralph Stanley's son, Ralph Stanley II, then brought it to Brown and West, whose label covers both bluegrass and the wider Americana world.

The Stanley Brothers enter the Country Music Hall of Fame

The album was timed to the duo's long-delayed induction. Carter and Ralph Stanley are part of the 2026 Country Music Hall of Fame class in the Veterans Era Artist category.

Starting in the mid-1940s, the brothers and their band, the Clinch Mountain Boys, blended the string-band sound of Bill Monroe with the mountain ballads and church singing they grew up with in southwestern Virginia, plus harmonies modeled on the Carter Family. Their reach ran well past country: artists from Bob Dylan to Bruce Springsteen took something from them.

West thinks most players have lost track of where the songs came from. "I feel like a lot of their stuff is just in the ether," he said. "It's just there, and it's taken for granted." He would bet a lot of musicians who play these tunes in pickup bands have no idea they are Stanley Brothers songs.

Who else is on the record

Billy Strings and Drew Emmitt open the album with "If I Lose." Parton's track follows. After that comes Jamey Johnson and songwriter Shawn Camp on a stark "Rank Strangers to Me," Jim Lauderdale with the Travelin' McCourys on "Ridin' That Midnight Train," and Willie Nelson with Sierra Ferrell on "I'll Fly Away."

Ralph Stanley II and Tim O'Brien sing "Mother No Longer Awaits Me at Home" with the Clinch Mountain Boys. The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band takes "Think of What You've Done" with Brown, Rhiannon Giddens and Dirk Powell handle "Little Birdie," and Dierks Bentley teams with Della Mae on "How Mountain Girls Can Love." Kristin Scott Benson, Gena Britt and Brown play "Ralph's Banjo Special," and the trio I'm With Her (Aoife O'Donovan, Sarah Jarosz and Sara Watkins) closes it out with the hymn-like "Going Up Home to Live in Green Pastures."

Willie Nelson needed a second pass

Nelson recorded remotely too. His first version came back with him simply harmonizing along with the guide vocal. The producers asked his longtime producer, Buddy Cannon, to try again, and Nelson delivered a strong lead vocal and a guitar solo.

West then figured "there was room for another voice, a different generational take on it," and brought in Sierra Ferrell, which turned "I'll Fly Away" into a duet.

Steve Martin and Ed Helms rewrote an old comedy bit

Track 10, "Pardon Me, Stranger," is a rebuild of "How Far to Little Rock," a comedy routine the Stanley Brothers performed onstage for years. Brown and Martin each wrote part of the new song. Martin and Helms wrote fresh jokes to replace the old-timey ones.

The finished recording has three banjos on it. Helms picks alongside Brown and Martin, which is not a sentence most tribute albums get to put on the sleeve.

A tribute concert follows on Oct. 28

Brown and West will gather many of the album's artists for a live tribute at Nashville's CMA Theater on Oct. 28. They are not ready to announce which performers will be there.

The producers see the album, the concert and the Hall of Fame induction as a starting point rather than a capstone. "Our hope is that younger players just pick up on the music again and keep it moving forward and keep it alive and keep reinventing it," West told Rolling Stone. "Not being afraid of reinventing it, not being afraid of freshening it up."

Bluegrass was never a side project for Parton

She grew up on mountain music, folk and Appalachian gospel, and she cut a version of Jimmie Rodgers' bluegrass standard "Mule Skinner Blues" early in her career.

Later she made three bluegrass albums for Sugar Hill Records: the Grammy-winning The Grass Is Blue in 1999, Little Sparrow in 2001 and Halos & Horns in 2002. That last one included her bluegrass rendition of Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven."

Her manager listed the projects still coming

After Parton's death, longtime manager Danny Nozell put out a long list of things she had been working on. "Dolly worked up until the day she died. She loved seeing her dreams come to life, and loved knowing her work brought people joy," Nozell said in a press release. "Ever the planner, Dolly worked with the team that she handpicked for the past several years to build a project roadmap that will guide us for decades to come."

On the list: Dolly Dolls, Dolly's Cup Of Ambition Coffee, Dolly's Dog Treats and her Broadway musical. Nozell said more details are coming on an avatar show, a biopic, a docuseries, a scripted series and a Billy The Kid animated series. He stressed that anything released through her official channels is something Parton put her personal stamp on.

One song stays locked up until 2046

Parton wrote "My Place in History" in 2015 and put it in a lockbox at Dollywood's DreamMore Resort in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. Her instructions were strict. It is not to be opened until Jan. 19, 2046, which would have been her 100th birthday.

For now there is "Bound to Ride," posted to YouTube ahead of the album's Oct. 16 release, with Parton hollering at a band she never stood in a room with.