A voice that sang about Heaven long before she got there. As we say goodbye to Dolly Parton, we remember the Gospel songs she wrote, including Golden Streets of Glory, and the love and generosity she modelled off stage. This is our tribute to a woman God used so mightily to bring joy, hope and love to millions.
Dolly Parton has died at the age of 80, her nephew, Bryan Seaver, confirmed on 25 August 2026. (see video below) The country music icon passed away in Nashville after being admitted to Vanderbilt University Medical Center with kidney and autoimmune issues.
Dolly’s passing comes 18 months after the death of her husband Carl Dean, who she was married to for nearly 60 years and who died in March 2025 at the age of 82. Just 10 days before her own death, Dolly had cancelled a planned appearance at Dollywood after her doctor advised her not to travel.
Tributes have poured in from across the music industry, but for many believers, Parton’s passing is also a moment to remember a life shaped early on by Gospel music and a grandfather who preached from the pulpit. Her grandfather, Reverend Jake Owens, was a Pentecostal preacher, and Dolly later wrote Daddy Was an Old Time Preacher Man as a tribute to him, one of several gospel songs that came from her own pen.
Golden Streets of Glory
Among those, Golden Streets of Glory is perhaps the most personal. In it she sang about hoping her feet were clean enough to walk into Heaven, and imagined the moment she reached her journey’s end.
“And when I’ve reached my journey’s end
And if I’m worthy to go in
Golden streets of glory, I walk on
And the golden streets of my new home
Will lead me up to the master’s throne
With the angel band I’ll sing”
(See Lyrics)
Dolly Parton Death – There was Jesus
Dolly’s Gospel catalogue runs deeper still. Her 1990 album He’s Alive won a Grammy. She also wrote God’s Coloring Book, Master’s Hand and contributed original Gospel numbers to the 2012 film Joyful Noise, including the opening track Not Enough.
In 2019 she featured on There Was Jesus, a Zach Williams duet that went on to win its own Grammy and become a modern Gospel standard. Beautiful inside and out, Dolly wasn’t shy of sharing her musical talents with others. She spoke about the spiritual of her music as something closer to a calling than a career choice, saying she felt God was calling her into it and that her music was more ministry than job.
There Was Jesus is a song about looking back over your life, especially the hard, uncertain stretches, and realising only in hindsight that Jesus was there the whole time, even when it didn’t feel like it. Written by Zach Williams it reflects on 20 years of his own life he hadn’t recognised God’s presence in at the time.
This song is particularly poignant now, following news of the Dolly Parton death. It essentially does, in miniature, what an obituary does, asks what was actually present through it all. It landed late in her career, 2019, only a handful of years before she lost Carl and before her own health failed. She was singing about recognising Jesus in hard seasons not long before she entered her hardest one.
It’s also one of the few times in her long career she said the name Jesus explicitly, in a song, to a mainstream audience that would never seek out Gospel music on its own. That’s a bigger deal than it sounds, most of her most personal faith songs, including Golden Streets of Glory, stayed inside Christian and country circles. There Was Jesus reached further.
Dolly Parton in the UK
Dolly was dealy loved throughout the UK. Her 2014 Glastonbury set is remembered as one of the festival’s great moments, drawing an estimated 150,000 people, the biggest crowd of the weekend, and the BBC’s most watched Glastonbury broadcast that year. Fans turned up in blonde wigs and diamante to match her, and she later said playing Glastonbury had been a lifelong dream. It’s a fitting picture of how far her reach went, from the Smoky Mountains to a Somerset field, singing songs that, whether audiences realised it or not, often carried a Gospel underneath the glitter.
The faith of Dolly Parton
It would be too neat to call Dolly a straightforward church going believer. In later interviews she described herself as more spiritual than religious, saying she held her own personal relationship with God rather than aligning with a denomination. That honesty is worth naming rather than smoothing over, and it likely reflects where a lot of her audience find themselves too.
What is harder to dispute is the fruit of her faith in practice. Through the Dollywood Foundation, her Imagination Library has given away more than 200 million free books to children worldwide, and she has been a long time supporter of St Jude Children’s Research Hospital.
It is fitting that Dolly’s most loved song of all, I Will Always Love You, is the phrase the world has chosen to say goodbye to her with. Love, the Bible tells us, is patient and kind, and it was that kind of love Dolly modelled long before the tributes began, in the millions of books sent to children through the Imagination Library and in the warmth she was known to show strangers and stars alike. She sang about love for a living, but by every account, she lived it too.
In Golden Streets of Glory Dolly’s own lyric asks the question every honest heart eventually asks, “Am I worthy enough for Heaven?” None of us are, not by clean feet or a good life and we were never meant to be. The good news of the Gospel is that entry isn’t earned, it’s given. The Bible puts it plainly, it is by grace you have been saved, through faith, and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God, not by works, so that no one can boast. Jesus Himself carries us across that threshold, not our own effort.
We trust that Dolly now knows fully what she once sang about, that she isn’t hoping her feet are clean enough any longer, she’s resting in the grace that was always the point of the song. We too need to ensure we are walking the golden streets and singing in the company of the angel band.
If reading this has stirred something in you and you would like the same certainty, you can pray this simply, in your own words: Lord Jesus, I know I can’t make myself good enough for Heaven on my own. Thank you for dying in my place and rising again. I put my trust in you today, forgive me, come into my life, and lead me home. Amen.
For more stories of faith from well known lives, visit the Faith Heroes category
Wordsmith, overcomer and exhorter. Al has a degree in Journalism and Media Studies and years of communications experience in Africa, the UK, Israel and USA. He left South Africa in 2001 and worked for GOD TV in England for 18 years. He now heads up Countdown Creative, a content creation business in Exeter. Al is the author of three biographies. Blogs he writes for include GODTV.com; International Christian and UK and US Christian.
