January 17, 2026

by Ann Powers

This week, our critic celebrates two artists — one recently departed and one on the cusp of her ninth decade — who have given us lifetimes of music.

Ed Perlstein/Getty Images

Hello sweethearts,

It may not seem like much in a bleak midwinter growing grayer every day, but today I want to give you a chance to light a candle and celebrate. Or two, in honor of musicians who have long embodied what I’m going to call, imperiously, the American spirit. Or at least a manifestation of that disputed and ever-morphing ideal. One, Bob Weir, departed this mortal plane last week; the other, Dolly Parton, turns 80 on Monday. As different as they may seem, thinking about them as a pair has helped me remember how important it is to live life with intention, all the way.

Parton is country music’s designated ambassador of happiness, and one of the few public figures whose value seemingly everyone can agree on these days. She’s designed herself a tribute in the form of a new, gospelized rendition of her 1977 power ballad “Light of a Clear Blue Morning” with support from her goddaughter Miley Cyrus, Queen Latifah, Reba McEntire and Lainey Wilson. The Grand Ole Opry is blowing kisses in her direction on Saturday night with the fourth annual “Opry Goes Dolly” program, featuring stars like Wilson and Vince Gill performing Dolly’s hits, Duncan Hines Dolly treats available in the lobby and a Dolly impersonator on the plaza. Dolly herself won’t be there; she’s made it her custom to provide a video for these Opry parties instead of attending.

That might be disappointing to some Oprygoers, but not too much — as in Dollywood, where screen projections and photographs of Dolly make her ubiquitous in absentia, what really matters at a gathering like this one is the shared desire among performers and fans to manifest the spirit of a woman whose graciousness, optimism and humor have long extended beyond her mortal form to infuse anything with her name on it. Including cake mixes. And, more recently, frozen dinners.

As she’s settled into her senectitude, Parton has not grown less active as a pop engine; if anything, she’s revved up her presence in that marketplace. She’s done so by completely nailing the art of collaboration. Her last solo album was 2023’s Rockstar, a response to her being unexpectedly elected to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and featured powerhouse pals ranging from Miley to Chris Stapleton and Sting. In 2024 she released the “aural family scrapbook” Smoky Mountain DNA, on which she took a back seat to family members, including AI-abetted specters of her grandfather and uncles, a Gen Z niece and a rapping nephew.

2025 saw Parton shift her recorded efforts toward one-offs, showing up on duets with country mainstays Zac Brown and The Grascals and, in a gesture that showed her commitment to at least the idea of rock stardom, a charting duet with metal gods Mötley Crüe on a remake of the band’s 1985 power ballad “Home Sweet Home.” Sweetly, Crüe drummer Nikki Sixx told writer Steve Baltin that Parton was partly motivated by her husband Carl Dean’s love for the song; Dean had died months before they collaborated.

Parton has always moved comfortably between commercial and artistic motivations, and these duets show her covering all of her bases. The Grascals song was a gesture of goodwill toward the band, which started out backing her on her own bluegrass efforts. The Brown ballad gave Parton her second-ever No. 1 on country’s Digital Song sales chart.

Clearly, Dolly’s still kicking. She has a new musical heading to Broadway and a new hotel with a 20,000 square foot museum attached that is set to open in Nashville in June. Recent brand collaborations include Dolly Wines, Dolly Beauty and Doggy Parton, a pet toy line. There’s also a tour of symphonic renditions of Parton songs in the works, and the first-ever Dolly’s Tennessean Travel Stop, a branded gas station, will open not far from the Alabama border this summer. Watch out, Buc-ee’s!

These partnerships have allowed Parton to be ubiquitous in the culture even as she faced health challenges that caused her to slow down her performance schedule. She’s told reporters that after the death of Dean she neglected her health, and that her decision to walk away from a Vegas residency was motivated by the need for care and rest. In a quote from her appearance on Khloé Kardashian’s podcast that circulated widely, Parton said that she hasn’t been able to do much creative work while she grieves: “I can’t afford the luxury of getting that emotional right now.” While that’s certainly disappointing to admirers of Parton’s genius songcraft, the way Parton is coping with this late-in-life stage makes a lot of sense when you really think about her artistry. Since the days of “Dumb Blonde,” a manifesto that’s 60 years old this year, Parton has worked as hard at establishing herself as a relatable and dynamic character as on writing songs that others would judge as authentic.

Her legacy is her songbook, barely rivaled in country music. It is also her life story, a classic American bootstraps tale made contemporary by Parton’s heroic victories over sexism and her open-hearted attitude, which created room within a fairly traditional white Southern milieu for people who’ve often been excluded from the so-called American Dream — queer people, especially. And her legacy is also that brand, which in what must be the most benign devil’s deal in the history of capitalism not only makes her (and her charities, like the remarkable Imagination Library) tons of cash; it establishes and extends the Dolly Universe, which emerged from the big bang of her music but now transcends and thrives beyond it. In that space, Parton’s take on family values — emphasizing tolerance, pleasure, opportunity, hard work and joy — can thrive no matter what’s happening in the real world. As a queen of the marketplace, Parton has long recognized that her worldview is best shored up through commerce.

A cynic might say she’s simply selling a fantasy, offering entry into a pink-products club that distracts from the real world. I remain impressed by the holistic nature of her vision, which never fails to be welcoming, reflecting an approach to life that can too often feel out of reach right now: sincere, hopeful, good-natured, holding on to the light of that morning.

Contrast Dolly’s approach to the sunset years of a storied career with that of Bob Weir, who passed away at 78 last weekend, not long after he had recovered from a bout with cancer, according to his family. Weir was as prolific as Dolly throughout the 2020s and as determined to solidify the huge impression he’d already made. Like so many 1960s icons, he wasn’t interested in retirement. He built something bigger than himself in his time here, as Dolly continues to do, but unlike her, it’s not grounded in an image or a life story. Instead, Weir shored up his legacy by continually expanding on the Grateful Dead music that he’d helped create. The songs he wrote for that band form the hub of a wheel to which he kept adding spokes, adjusting and adding to the Dead’s ever-flexible legacy. As a founding member of the band that defined collectivity for the counterculture generation, Weir understood that musical interplay would also be the best foundation for his own storytelling.

In his excellent elegy for Weir, writer Stephen Thomas Erlewine identifies him as the Dead member who could most successfully “slide between the counterculture and the mainstream.” Don Was, who played in Weir’s recent band the Wolf Bros, told my colleague (and NPR Music’s resident Deadhead) Felix Contreras that the most valuable lesson the rhythm guitarist and singer taught him was the fearlessness that sprang from “obliterating self-consciousness.” If Dolly Parton’s public self and her story is the means by which she has continually expanded her cultural reach, Weir used the opposite approach, immersing himself within many different bands and projects, all rooted in what he and his Dead bandmates had done within the nearly 30 years of their core existence.

Exploring the Dead’s catalog and its aesthetics within many different bands after Jerry Garcia’s death shattered the original group, Weir earned the title that his friend and occasional collaborator Margo Price gave him in her own fare thee well: She called him a “sage,” someone who was both “ancient and young.” Collaborators and fans alike credit Weir for continually rejuvenating the Dead’s place in musical history by bringing in younger players to keep its catalog renewable, forming different combos who could follow various threads within the group’s complicated weave and making sure that the conventional legacy efforts the Dead pursued, like symphonic concerts or reunion shows, always favored experimentation over nostalgia. Price recalled one crazy night when Weir put her onstage with his band and the troubadour Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and instructed them to write a song on the spot. Both Price and Elliott demurred, but Weir kept the improv on the set list — and, in the moment, “A song appeared,” she writes. “It was a long, sprawling, free-flowing poem and once they got Jack wound up, there was no telling where he would stop.”

Weir was, and Parton is, gifted with the ability to create worlds in which the past and the present merge. Neither ever put themselves out to the pastures where once-vital artists become oldies acts; instead, a strong focus on building a continuum has kept them relevant against the odds. Not every elder in music has the ability or the opportunity to make this happen. Music fans may pride themselves on their loyalty, but just as often they’re simultaneously fickle and inflexible, wanting their heroes to remain the same while looking over their shoulders for a younger, more tantalizing object of interest.

Throughout her career, Parton often reinvented her sound while always keeping her unparalleled storytelling and voice at the center of her ventures. The wide palette of her music complemented her focused approach to creating a persona to keep what might have felt like a schtick fun and fresh. Weir, on the other hand, was in some ways a chameleon, a rhythm guitarist whose responsive approach was grounded in his love of jazz, and a singer and songwriter who thought of song structure in geographical terms, making maps that his bandmates could utilize as they desired. These two very different people show us that in music, legacy is always dynamic and in need of nurturing. That’s a great lesson for anyone in a creative field who wants to enter life’s later years assured of leaving a mark.

One more note on the general subject of elders in music: One reason the best still deserve our attention is the perspective they give on life phases (and physiological realities) that the trend-driven pop world tends to ignore. Two heroines of mine who happen to both be 72 years old are releasing new music this season, and both rep for full adulthood in powerful ways. World’s Gone Wrong, the new album by Lucinda Williams, is out January 23, and it’s a powerful reckoning with the mess that 21st century politics has made of our shared existence, with poignant and furious songs that add a new layer to Williams’ inimitable songbook. I love the video for the title track, which ends with Williams donning an inflatable polar bear suit in homage to the activists, many of them over 50, who’ve been out in the streets in recent months. Kim Gordon wears a very different costume in the video for “Not Today,” the blast of attitude announcing her upcoming album Play Me. The vintage Rodarte dress she wears fully shows her beautiful body — muscles, wrinkles, freckles, elbows — as she plays basketball or dances alone. These videos are treasures, antidotes to our current fillers-and-Ozempic afflicted celebrity sphere. They are glorious celebrations of life.

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Here are a few other things sustaining me this week

Daoud Tyler-Ameen and I have published another edition of our subscriber-only All Songs+ podcast focusing on older hits that still resonate. This time we travel to my beloved West Coast and through cyberspace to take on the unlikely story of The Postal Service, arguably the first internet band.
My pals know how important Robert Christgau and his wife and creative partner, Carola Dibbell, have been in my life. Now there’s a film all about their love, Bob’s long and storied and sometimes controversial career, and how to cram (what must be) 10 million books, albums and CDs into one legendary East Village apartment. I’m in it. Congrats to the director, Matty Wishnow!
Kudos also to Jonathan Bernstein, whose loving, honest biography of the late scion and troubadour Justin Townes Earle, What Do You Do When You’re Lonesome, is now out and available for your reading and weeping needs. Here’s a good chat between Jon and scholar and No Fences Substacker Charles Hughes.
“The world doesn’t need another love song,” croons Pedro Pastor in “Amar,” this flamenco-inflected collaboration between the Spanish singer and the Argentinian band El Plan de la Mariposa. Whatever you call it, I’m happy for this one.
Next week I’ll be very lucky to be in New Orleans for the always vibrant Folk Alliance International conference. (I’m on that organization’s board.) It’s gonna be fun! Will be breaking off, though, to eat a muffaletta at my fave spot, Cochon Butcher, and see Louis Michot at BJ’s.

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A special request

Maybe it’s because of the amount of other news flooding our feeds, but musically, 2026 feels like it has gotten off to a slow start. It won’t stay that way. What music are you looking forward to this year? A long-awaited album? A tour? A tradition? Tell us and we’ll share some of your responses in this space next week.

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