When Carl Dean, Dolly Parton’s husband of nearly 60 years, died in March 2025, Parton told The Associated Press, “I am a person of faith, and I truly believe that I’m going to see him again someday.”
When asked about death on a podcast in 2019, Parton said she believed that “we’re all part of that great divine plan. And I’m hoping to get on up there, and do some more writing, and singing, and playing with those golden harps ... and keep doing it forever and ever and ever.
“I’m going to get in the angel band, for sure,” she added. “It’s not the end of me … I don’t think it’s the end of any of us.”
This was the legendary singer’s hope. And with her passing this week at age 80, now the globally beloved “Saint Dolly” — who often insisted she was no saint or angel — gets to experience it for real.
Unafraid of death
Not that Parton wouldn’t have enjoyed staying here a little longer. In an April 2004 interview, Parton said, “I’ll be like Bob Hope, touring when I’m 100 … I hope to fall dead in the middle of some great event or some great song I’m singing. Then they’ll say, ‘Oh well, she went happy and doing what she loves.’”
In a 1989 interview, Parton was candid about the added dangers that come with stardom, including bomb scares and death threats. “You pray about it, you release it, you figure if it’s your time, it’s God’s will. And if it ain’t, it’s going to be fine anyway.”
In 2014, Parton said she wanted an “old country gospel church song, ‘If We Never Meet Again,’” sung at her funeral. She explained the song “talks about if we never meet again this side of heaven, I will meet you on that beautiful shore.”
“That was my daddy’s favorite. We did sing it at his funeral, and I would like it to be sung at mine.”
‘Learned to love Jesus as a little bitty kid’
Parton’s lifelong faith began at a young age. “I learned to love Jesus, and learned that Jesus loved me when I was a little bitty kid,” Parton said in 2017.
“All those things that Mama used to say, you know, that through God all things are possible — I kept all those things kind of tucked away into my subconscious mind and in my heart. And those are the things that have helped me through the years.”
In Parton’s childhood church, congregants prayed over people and anointed them with oil. An older woman in her congregation told her one day that her anointing meant she “was going to do great things,” she recalled in a 2019 interview.
Young Parton asked her mother what that meant. “Mama said … that just means that God has his hand on you, that you may do something special,” she said. “But that triggered a faith in me, because I believed that I was supposed to do something good.”
“I never let go of that. I always felt responsible to God that I was supposed to be doing something for God,” Parton said. “I still feel like that. And I’m still doing it ... trying to.”
“Sinning all the way,” she added, laughing, “but trying my best and asking for forgiveness 70 times seven.”
‘No angel,’ but a believer for sure
Parton sometimes hesitated in earlier years to call herself “Christian,” but later in life, she used the term to describe herself.
“I’m certainly no angel. Lord knows I’m not,” Parton said in 2017. “But I believe in something greater than myself. And I do believe in prayer. And I do believe in forgiveness. And I do believe that God is there for us.”
“How do you practice your faith?” she was asked on a 2020 podcast. She responded, “I don’t practice it. I live it.”
How she ‘stayed sane’
In a 1978 interview, Dolly spoke about her family. “We all believe in God … and we all have a good communication with God,” she said. “And I think that positive attitude — that’s one of the reasons that we stay sane and a lot of people in the business seem to be crazy.”
Then she added, in her trademark self-deprecating humor, “A lot of people say I’m crazy.”
“I pray every day. I pray about everything,” Parton told the Christian Broadcasting Network in 2017. “I ask God to lead me and guide me in all the decisions I make.”
More recently, discussing Paul’s encouragement to “pray without ceasing,” Parton admitted, “I used to think that was the silliest thing I ever heard ... How do you pray without ceasing? But that just means to keep that in your mind, to where it’s just planted in there. And then you can kind of always draw from that all through the day.”
“It’s very important to keep that first and foremost,” she said of her faith. “That keeps you strong, that keeps you grounded.”
‘Like my best friend’
“I talk to God like he is my best friend,” Parton said in 2019. “I just go around talking to him sometimes.
“I think if somebody saw me in my house, they’d think I was an absolute lunatic,” she said with a smile. “I just talk to God, and sometimes if something great has happened, I just kind of raise my hand, give God a high five or a thumbs up.”
In 2020, Parton called herself a “very, very, very early riser.” She shared that she did her best spiritual work and writing between 3 a.m. and 7 a.m., “during that little period of time when the world is calm, energies are down, and I just feel like a farmer.
“They say the early bird gets the worm. Well, they also get a lot of good ideas too.”
‘Doing something for God’
“Every single day, before I do anything, I wake up and I thank God for the night and ask him to bless the day,” Parton said in 2020. Earlier, she described asking God to “bring all the good and right people into my life and to take all the bad things out — and just to guide me, to do things glorify Him and to uplift mankind.”
“That’s my mission in this world,” she said.
Parton reiterated this in 2019, describing how she regularly prayed “that I will do something in this world to make it a little better than it was and let me be a light and a vessel to be used.”
In that interview, at age 73, Parton said she lived on “creative and spiritual energy” because she worked so hard.
“I really feel like I have a calling,” she added. “I feel like God told me early on, that feeling that I was supposed to go until he told me to stop, and he ain’t said nothing yet about quitting.”
‘Let me say something that matters to somebody else’
“There is a God light in all of us,” Parton said in 2019. “If you’re a scientist, you may just call it something, it doesn’t matter. There’s something bigger and better than us. And we need to connect to that to make us better people.”
The more you draw from that, she said, you’re better off — not just for yourself but also for the people whose lives you affect.
When asked in 2016, “What would you say it is that people see in you?” she responded, “I really like to think it’s God spark.
“I really do ask God every single day to let me do something, say something, be something that matters to somebody else. To make somebody feel good. To let people see a spark of love.”
‘I try to love everybody’
“There’s just so much craziness in the world,” Parton said in 2016. “We need to be brought together. We need to be a little more accepting, a little more forgiving, a little more harmonious.”
“In this intensely divided moment, one of the few things everyone still seems to agree on is Dolly Parton,” a 2019 podcast asks. “But why?”
Perhaps it’s because Parton always tried to “find the good,” as she told Vogue. “All those good Christian people who have something to say about everybody, I think: Well, where’s your religion?” she asked. “You’re taught not to judge, and you’re supposed to love your neighbor like yourself.
“I want to be loved, and so I try to love everybody.”