Brad Paisley Reflects On Sweet Memory With Late Legend Dolly Parton

Brad Paisley reflected on a special moment he shared with late legend Dolly Parton.

Paisley recently spoke with Joseph Hudak, senior music editor at Rolling Stone, on an episode of the publication's Nashville Nowpodcast. When asked about Parton, Paisley spoke about the duet they released together in 2005. Paisley released "When I Get Where I'm Going," written by Rivers Rutherford and George Teren, on his Time Well Wasted record. Paisley said he knew he wanted to sing the powerful ballad as a tribute to his late aunt, and he invited Parton to join him to take the song to an "angelic realm." He said on Nashville Now :

"Dolly would do anything she believed in. 'When I Get Where I'm Going,' when I cut that, my aunt Rita had passed away from cancer right before I cut that song. My mother's sister, who I grew up with. I had heard it and said 'I'm cutting this, but I need something that takes it into the angelic realm.' So, I sent it to Dolly and said, 'Would you sing this with me?' And she wrote back, "Absolutely. Who are you singing about?' And I was like, 'I'm going to do this about my aunt. In my mind, it's about my aunt.' And she said, 'Well, it's about my pappy.' And I'm like, 'OK. …I think the way to do this thing [the music video] is to (have) people hold photographs of the people that this is about for them.' She said, 'I'm gonna hold a picture of my pappy,' or whatever. And so, she drove out here and she came out and sat on the porch of this house and filmed holding that, and is in the video that way. And that was a great day because she spent a little time here. And what's so funny about her and Carl Dean, her husband, was so - he just was so happy to be in the shadows that she was in here a while. Like, we walked around, talked in the house, and we had a great day. And then she went out to get in the car and I see him waving. He didn't even come in. He was so happy to just drive her around and stuff. And she went and got in the car and drove away."

"It's really hard to believe that this song, which I did with her, is now about her," Paisley said.

Parton "died peacefully" on August 25 in Nashville, Tennessee, according to an official announcement issued at the time. She was 80. The "I Will Always Love You" icon's representatives shared in a statement to PEOPLE that day, "after bravely facing a brief battle with cancer, Dolly departed her Earthly life today at the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center surrounded by loved ones." Parton was laid to rest beside Dean, who died in March 2025. He was 82.