Dolly Parton once admitted she wanted to dig her own song up.
“I want to go dig that up so bad,” she told Kelly Clarkson in 2022.
The song is called “My Place in History,” and no one but Dolly ever knew how it goes. Dollywood confirmed to ABC News the day after Dolly died that it is still sealed inside a chestnut box at the park’s DreamMore Resort in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, where it will stay until January 19, 2046, the day she would have turned 100.
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She wrote and recorded it in 2015, the year the resort opened, when she was 69. It sits on a CD, and she made sure a CD player went in with it so whoever opens the box will have a way to play it. Local reports say the box also holds a letter she wrote to the future and her handwritten lyrics.
A placard inside says only Dolly Parton knew its melody and its words, and that she meant it to be released as her last.
Dolly Parton Never Liked Waiting on That Song
The idea came from her team as a way to celebrate the new resort, and Dolly went along with it, though she never quite made peace with it. She told Clarkson it was an odd feeling to be asked to write a song nobody would hear, that it drove her cr𝐚zy, and that she was not sure whose idea it had been in the first place.
Her biggest worry was that it might rot in there before anyone got to hear it.
In her 2020 book, Songteller, she joked her way through the same fear.
“Hopefully, it will play and the whole thing ain’t rotted,” she wrote.
For You
As for whether she would make it to 100 to hear it herself, she wrote that she might, and if she did, she would be at that opening. Dolly died on August 25 at 80, after a brief battle with cancer, and she asked for a small, private service for her family.
The Man Who Built the Box Helped Make Dolly Parton
The box itself tells a second story. It was built by her uncle Bill Owens, her mother Avie Lee‘s brother, and the placard calls it a tribute to her “original mentor and uncle.”
Owens taught Dolly to play guitar when she was 8. By 10, he had her singing on the Cas Walker Farm and Home Hour in Knoxville, and he got her onto the Grand Ole Opry stage when she was 13. Later they wrote songs together, including “Put It Off Until Tomorrow,” the 1966 BMI Song of the Year.
He spent the rest of his life trying to bring back the American chestnut, a tree native to the Smoky Mountains. Dolly said in her eulogy that he and his wife, Sandy, planted 70,000 of them on Dollywood land. That is why the box is chestnut.
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When he died in 2021 at 85, Dolly began her goodbye with one plain sentence.
“I wouldn’t be here if he hadn’t been there,” she said.
The uncle who put a guitar in her hands as a little girl built the box that holds her last song, out of the tree he spent his life trying to save. Twenty years from now, somebody will lift that lid in a resort lobby in the Smokies, and Dolly Parton will sing one more time for people who were not even born when she recorded it.
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