Dolly Parton was 14 when she sang on her uncles’ records without her own name on them.
She and her younger sisters, Stella and Cassie, sang background vocals behind Bill and Louis Owens on two Knoxville-produced singles, billed only as the Vocalaires.
More than six decades later, those songs are back. Owepar Entertainment has released Tomorrow’s Tears Today, a newly remastered collection of 18 recordings The Owens Brothers made between 1961 and 1967. Whiskey Riff reports that it includes the two singles with the Parton sisters, “Vagabond” and “It Seems Like a Lifetime,” from 1961 and 1962, and that the songs were restored from rare 45 rpm records.
The Owens Brothers were Dolly’s uncles, and they were among the earliest professional performers in the Owens-Parton family. Bill, the younger brother of her mother, Avie Lee Owens Parton, was her most important mentor and is best known as the man who launched her career.
Dolly Parton Sang Behind Her Uncles While She Was Making Records of Her Own
The three sisters, as the Vocalaires, sang with Bill on the collection’s early recordings. It was Dolly’s second appearance on a record, after her debut single, “Puppy Love,” and this time someone else’s name was on the label.
That first record came out of the same family partnership. Bill wrote “Puppy Love” with her when she was 11, and she cut it for Goldband Records in 1959 at 13, with him involved in the recording.
Her own name was on a record during that same stretch, too. In 1962, Mercury Records released “It’s Sure Gonna Hurt,” a song Dolly and Bill wrote together, as a Dolly Parton single. So in the same years she was putting out a record under her own name, she was also singing in the background of her uncles’ records with her little sisters.
Fans have also seen Dolly at 14 on film, but without sound. In 2021, archivist Bradley Reeves shared 1961 home-movie footage on WBIR of a 14-year-old Dolly singing and playing guitar for a small crowd in a gas station parking lot in East Tennessee. Haroldine Worthington shot it on a silent 8-mm home movie camera, and the film has no sound.
The restored 45s give that girl her voice back.
Uncle Bill Owens Worked Behind the Scenes of Dolly Parton’s Career From the Time She Was 8
Bill bought Dolly her first store-bought guitar and taught her to play when she was 8. At 10, he drove her to her first real gig on The Cas Walker Show in Knoxville. Smoky Mountain DNA reports that he began managing his niece that same year, 1956, and that he played guitar on her first recordings and secured her early radio performances.
The partnership kept growing as she did. They co-wrote “Put It Off Until Tomorrow,” a major hit in 1966 that earned them a BMI Award, and in 1967 they formed Owepar Music to publish their songs. The name combines Owens and Parton, and it is the same as the name of the company behind Tomorrow’s Tears Today.
Country Thang Daily has also reported that Bill built the chestnut box at Dollywood that holds her sealed final song.
For You
When he died on April 7, 2021, at 85, Dolly wrote a eulogy that opened with the debt she owed him.
“I’ll start this eulogy by saying I wouldn’t be here if he hadn’t been there,” she wrote.
She remembered on her website that he took her around to all the local shows and got her that first job on The Cas Walker Show, and she suspected that even his own family didn’t know all he had done.
“I bet a lot of our own relatives don’t even know all of the great things that Uncle Bill did behind the scenes through his life,” she wrote.
She admitted it was hard to know for sure what all a person owes somebody for their success, and then she settled the question for herself.
“But I can tell you for sure that I owe Uncle Billy an awful lot.”
Then she named the biggest debt of all. “But the greatest thing he ever did for me was to help me see my dreams come true, and for that I will be forever grateful,” she wrote.
Dolly died in Nashville on August 25, 2026, at 80, after what her reps called a “brief battle with cancer,” more than five years after she lost the uncle who launched her career.
Under Owepar, the name Dolly and her Uncle Bill built out of Owens and Parton, his old records are back, and on two of them, a 14-year-old Dolly is singing right behind him with her little sisters.
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