Our Favorite Dolly Parton Performances

“High Sierra”

On Tuesday, in the moments after I heard that Dolly Parton had died, I returned immediately to “Light of a Clear Blue Morning.” It’s a song I’ve always loved, even when I was a child, and that feels so cathartic to me: the slowness of the opening verse followed by the beat of the chorus, the reminder that things are going to be OK, that fun will exist if you just wait. But every year, I keep a playlist of new (to me) songs I’ve discovered, and a playlist of not-new songs that I’ve put on repeat through the year. At the end of the year, the second playlist is usually the one that creates a kind of soundtrack for my life. And yesterday, when I looked through my playlists for the last 20 years, it wasn’t “Light of a Clear Blue Morning” that was my most frequently repeated Dolly song. It was “High Sierra.”