Katie and Sheryl Crow Honor Dolly Parton and Her Legacy

Katie Couric Media Tue, August 25, 2026 at 9:37 PM UTC

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Katie and Sheryl Crow Honor Dolly Parton and Her Legacy

It's hard to imagine a world without Dolly Parton. And for Sheryl Crow, who knew and worked with Parton over the years, the news of her unexpected death felt like a “gut punch.”

“I felt totally shocked when I heard that she had passed, as if she was never going to ever go,” Crow told Katie Couric during an emotional conversation about the music legend on Tuesday. She said she knew Parton had been dealing with health issues but felt like she “was always going to be here.”

Katie understood the feeling. Though she said she knew Parton only “very superficially” through interviewing her over the years, she remembered someone who seemed larger than life — yet somehow entirely herself.

“There was something so grounded in who she was, and so much authenticity in a world where that word has now become so overused,” Katie said. Parton, she added, was simply “the genuine article.”

Crow saw that up close. She first met Parton in 1995, when Crow was still, as she put it, a “straight-up newbie” who had gone from teaching school in a tiny Missouri town to suddenly finding herself face-to-face with the country icon. Over the years, the two became friends and worked together, giving Crow a front-row seat to all the things that made Dolly, well, Dolly. Like the time Parton showed up at Crow’s studio at 10 a.m. wearing leather jeans and a leather bustier, with her hair and makeup already done.

“I was like, ‘OK. You are a rock star. I am somebody’s mom, OK?’” Crow joked.

Katie had her own memories of that famously over-the-top image. During one interview, Parton delivered one of her classic “Dollyisms” about just how much work went into it: “Takes a lot of money to look this cheap.”

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But Katie also saw what was underneath all that bling. She recalled an “inner steeliness” in Parton and someone who “did not suffer fools gladly.” Crow agreed, saying that behind Parton’s down-home charm was a “completely brilliant” woman who knew how to navigate a music industry that wasn't exactly welcoming to women.

“She was always funny and kind and brilliant and whip smart,” Crow said. She watched Parton forge her own path without tearing down the people around her. As Crow put it, Parton “stepped around people and she did what she needed to do and how she was gonna do it.”

That combination of strength and kindness came up again and again as the two swapped memories. Crow recalled Parton once saying, “I don't have to like everybody, but I don't have any trouble loving everybody.”

And she seemed to live by it. “She brought people together that would never be on the same wavelength politically, whatever, but everybody could agree on Dolly,” Crow said. “She was an arbiter of love and of helping.”

That spirit extended from her philanthropy to the way she treated the people around her. Crow remembered someone who genuinely wanted others to succeed and who had a way of making you feel special just by being around her.

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“She just felt like somebody who wanted to see other people do well and wanted to lift people up,” Crow said. And perhaps that’s part of what makes her absence so difficult to comprehend. As Crow put it, “There’s just nobody like her.”

Want to hear more? Watch the full conversation above, in which they reveal the Dolly songs that mean the most to them.

The post Katie and Sheryl Crow Honor Dolly Parton and Her Legacy appeared first on Katie Couric Media.

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Source: “AOL Entertainment”