She’s leavin’ a partin’ gift.
An unreleased Dolly Parton song lives buried in a time capsule at Dollywood. But it’s not coming out anytime soon — no matter how badly Parton wishes it would.
During a recent stop on “The Kelly Clarkson Show,” the 76-year-old country superstar recalled recording the track in 2015 with the intention of premiering it 30 years later.
“You have no idea how that has bothered me,” Parton admitted to Clarkson. “I wanna go dig that up so bad. … It’s a really good song!”
Parton would be 99 years old upon the song’s release in 2045 — and she’s fully aware she may not be alive when the world finally gets to hear it.
“I don’t know whose damn idea that was,” she joked.
“They weren’t expecting me to be there at all, and I probably won’t be. I might be there, who knows,” she continued.
“I figure it’ll probably disintegrate, probably nobody [will] ever hear it. That’s what bothers me, to think that it’s going to be a song that nobody’s ever going to hear if it rots in there before they open it.”
Parton claims she buried “things that had to do with the times” along with the song, including a cassette and CD player.
She revealed the song’s existence in her 2020 book, “Songteller: My Life in Lyrics,” writing that stowing the song away in the capsule felt “like burying one of my kids, putting it on ice or something, and I won’t be around to see it brought back to life.”
“It’s just burning me up inside that I have to leave it in there,” she added.
In the nearer future, the “Jolene” songstress plans to expand her empire with a museum in Nashville. Dollywood is in Pigeon Forge, southeast of Knoxville.
“We have the museum at Dollywood, of course, but I would love to have something here since this is really my home,” she told the Tennessean in November. “And I may have a restaurant or a bar and grill. Right now, though, I’ve got so many things going. I can do without that for the moment. But someday I will have a business here.”
For now, Parton can look forward to ringing in the new year with goddaughter Miley Cyrus during “Miley’s New Year’s Eve Party,” airing on NBC and streaming on Peacock at 10:30 p.m. Eastern time on Dec. 31.