Within six months, Dolly Parton lost two dear friends with their own irreplaceable roles in country music history: Naomi Judd and Loretta Lynn. During an interview with Today's Hoda Kotb, Parton got candid about grieving country legends lost in recent years.
"Those things are very special," Parton said. "With Loretta, she was very dear to me, like a sister. Same with Naomi. We were [the] same age, and we loved the same things. And I loved her."
This decade — much less this year — has been rough for Parton and her peers. Since 2020, Kenny Rogers, Charley Pride, Joe Diffie, Tom T. Hall, Bobbie Nelson, Harold Reid of the Statler Brothers and Jeff Cook of Alabama have been among the all-time greats to pass away.
"I also lost Kenny Rogers — three of my dearest people — in the business, in a very short period of time," Parton added. "I grieve over them almost like you do a family member. And I think of them, but you try to keep the good memories."
In such troubling times, Parton turns to a hymn popularized by Alan Jackson, "Precious Memories."
"The line I love in that song is, 'Precious memories, unseen angels sent from somewhere to my soul,'" she explained. "And I think about that. Those precious memories. They just flow in and out of you, and you remember special things about them. [They're] like unseen angels, and you feel like they're still all around you."
Parton closed the interview with an on-brand New Year's Resolution that kept the needs of others first.
"My hopes for the new year is a little more kindness, a little more love, a little more trying to pull together instead of falling apart. I'm going to try my best to try to bring as much joy as I can and lift people up as much as I can in my way," Parton said. "I just think we all need to try a little harder. I don't care what our politics are, or religion, or our color or anything else. We need to try a little harder."
