Dolly Parton, the country music icon who died on January 29, 2024, at age 80, left behind an unreleased song intended to be unveiled on her 100th birthday in 2046. The recording, titled ‘My Place In History,’ is stored in a sealed wooden box at Dollywood’s DreamMore Resort in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee.
The artifact, displayed in a glass case in the resort’s lower-level lobby, includes a CD player and the recorded track. Parton wrote and recorded the song in 2015, the same year the DreamMore Resort opened. In her 2020 memoir Songteller: My Life in Lyrics, she described the decision to bury the song as akin to ‘burying one of my kids.’ She expressed frustration at the delay, noting in a 2022 interview with The Kelly Clarkson Show that she hoped the recording would not degrade before its scheduled release.
The glass case also contains a piece of wood from Parton’s childhood home in Sevierville, Tennessee, where she grew up singing with her 11 siblings. The resort features additional tributes, including a hallway lined with her album covers and bedazzled instruments in the lobby.
Parton’s health declined in late 2023, leading to her admission to Nashville’s Vanderbilt University Medical Center in December 2023 for autoimmune and kidney issues. Her death was confirmed in a video posted by her nephew, Bryan Seaver, who served as her head of security.
The song’s existence was first publicly discussed in Parton’s memoir, where she wrote: ‘There’s no telling what music is going to be by then. Hopefully, it will play and the whole thing ain’t rotted.’ She also noted in the memoir that she might not live to see the song’s release, joking in the 2022 interview that she would be 99 years old by 2046.
Parton’s career spanned seven decades, during which she achieved 46 years of No. 1 hits on the US Top Country Albums chart, a record recognized by the Guinness World Records. In September 2023, she postponed her Las Vegas residency due to health challenges, marking one of her final public announcements.