On Wednesday night, October 21, 2026, Carrie Underwood walked onto the stage of the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Belmont University in Nashville to sing the last song of CMA Presents I Will Always Love You: A Celebration of Dolly Parton. It had been just under two months since Dolly Parton died on August 25 at the age of 80, after a brief battle with cancer.
The song was the one the whole night was named after. And for Carrie Underwood, it was a song with a long history, one that ran straight through some of the most personal moments of Dolly’s final years.
The last song of the night
Vince Gill introduced her. Carrie Underwood came out in a flowing white ballgown decorated with butterflies, the symbol Dolly Parton carried with her for most of her life, while a photo of Dolly shone on the big screen behind her.
She began “I Will Always Love You” alone. As the song reached its final chorus, the rest of the evening’s performers came out to join her. More than 20 artists filled the stage, among them Reba McEntire, Vince Gill, Brad Paisley, Lainey Wilson and Ella Langley, and they sang the closing lines together.
When it ended, the audience rose to its feet. The two-hour special aired live on ABC and Disney+, and the CMA, Belmont University and their partners announced a combined $1 million donation to Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, the program she built to put free books in the hands of children.
The night in March 2025 when she sang it to Dolly
To understand why that moment carried so much weight, you have to go back nineteen months.
On March 3, 2025, Dolly Parton’s husband, Carl Dean, died at their home in Nashville. He was 82. They had been together for more than 60 years and married since 1966, and he had stayed almost entirely out of the spotlight the whole time.
Just over two weeks later, on March 19, NBC aired Opry 100: A Live Celebration for the Grand Ole Opry’s 100th birthday. Dolly was not there in person. She sent a video message instead.
Near the end of the night, Reba McEntire spoke to her directly from the stage, telling Dolly that everyone at the Opry and around the world was sending thoughts and prayers. Then Reba added:
“And you gotta know, we will always love you.”
With that, Reba McEntire, Carrie Underwood and Lady A led a choir of roughly 50 Opry members in “I Will Always Love You.” It closed the show, a song Dolly wrote, sung back to her while she grieved.
Two days later, on March 21, Dolly answered on Instagram. She wrote that she had not stopped crying since she saw it, that she had cried enough to wash a great deal of the pain away, and she thanked everyone who made it possible. She signed off with a line that turned the song right back around to the people who had sung it:
“I also will always love you.”
A song Carrie kept coming back to
The Opry night was not the first time Carrie Underwood had sung this song with Dolly Parton in mind. It was a thread that ran through nearly her whole career.
In December 2009, Dolly was a guest on Carrie Underwood: An All-Star Holiday Special on Fox, and the two sang “I Will Always Love You” together, side by side. Dolly had written it in 1973, a full decade before Carrie was born.
In January 2016, Carrie added the song to her Storyteller tour. Introducing it at a show in Los Angeles that year, she told the crowd that of all the women she fell in love with as a young listener, there was one in particular, and she put it simply: “There’s just something about her.”
That November, at the 50th CMA Awards, Dolly received the Willie Nelson Lifetime Achievement Award. A group of country’s leading women sang a medley of her hits, and it ended with “I Will Always Love You,” led by Carrie Underwood and Martina McBride before the whole group joined in. Dolly was in the audience, crying. Reba McEntire wrapped it up with a line only Reba could deliver: “Gosh dang it, Dolly, we love you to pieces.”
So by Wednesday night, Carrie Underwood had sung this song beside Dolly, sung it to Dolly at an awards show, and sung it to Dolly in her grief. This time, she sang it for a Dolly who was no longer here to hear it.
A goodbye song, one more time
There is something fitting in that, because “I Will Always Love You” was a goodbye from the very beginning.
Dolly Parton wrote it as a farewell to Porter Wagoner, the country star who gave her a major break by bringing her onto his television show in the late 1960s. The two recorded a long run of duet albums together, but Dolly knew she had to leave to build her own career. She wrote the song to tell him so, with gratitude instead of bitterness. It became a No. 1 country hit in 1974, went to No. 1 again with a new recording in 1982, and in 1992 Whitney Houston carried it around the world.
On Wednesday night, the song went back to its first job. Only this time, the goodbye was to the woman who wrote it.
The day Dolly’s family announced her death, Carrie Underwood shared photos of the two of them together on Instagram, writing words that fit right alongside the song she would sing two months later:
“She’s not gone. I know exactly where she is.”
Where were you the first time you heard Dolly sing “I Will Always Love You”? We’d love to hear your memories in the comments.