Dolly Parton’s still a massive fan of her and Kenny Rogers’ 1984 holiday album Once Upon a Christmas.
The classic LP features hits like Hard Candy Christmas, With Bells On and Christmas Without You, with Dolly admitting that despite releasing two more festive albums – 1990’s Home For Christmas and 2020 release A Holly Dolly Christmas – she’d have happily made more holiday albums.
“The reason I hadn’t done anything in 30 years is [because] Kenny Rogers, the album we did, still plays every Christmas, it’s still very hot,” she tells America’s Today show.
A Holly Dolly Christmas features collaborations with the likes of Michael Buble, Miley Cyrus, Billy Ray Cyrus, Jimmy Fallon, and her brother Randy Parton – but Dolly didn’t set out to create a duets album.
“I just wanted to do one on my own, but it turns out that I just brought all these other people to get involved in it as well,” she shares.
“It was a good time because everybody was kinda shut down, and I thought, ‘Well, this is the perfect time to write some new music, to get in [the studio] and safely do it and send out all the stuff [music] to other people [when] we couldn’t get in the studio together like we normally do,” Dolly reflects of recording amid the pandemic, “but this day and time, the new technology, that’s kinda how people are making records anyway.
“So we pulled it off, with all these great artists… I’m just really proud to have… all kinds of friends and family on there. It turned out really well.”
