Dolly Parton has made a secret song that will only be released in 2045

Dolly Parton may sadly be gone but we will still hear new music from her... one day.

The world has been rocked by the 'Queen of Country's' death at the age of 80 on Tuesday, August 25, after a 'brief battle with cancer,' according to her representatives.

The 11-time Grammy winner enjoyed a remarkably prolific music career, releasing 49 studio solo albums and releasing 956 individual songs.

All that alongside being an actor and her selfless charitable work, especially with her Imagination Library, which gifted books to children everywhere.

Parton's last song, 'If You Hadn't Been There', released on March 6, 2025, was an emotional tribute to her husband, Carl Dean, following his death earlier that week, aged 82.

But there will be at least one more song to come from Parton, as she recorded a 'really good song' called 'My Place in History' and placed it into a time capsule that won't be opened until 2045.

What Parton thinks of 'My Place in History'

Parton revealed in her 2020 memoir, Songteller: My Life in Lyrics, that she had written and recorded the never-heard-before track and stored it away at her Dollywood theme park in Tennessee.

With another two decades until it's finally released, to coincide with her 99th birthday on January 19, 2045, Dolly joked she may have some regrets in not releasing the tune.

“I had to write this song that nobody was going to hear ‘til then, and I tell you, you have no idea how that has bothered me,” she said on the Kelly Clarkson Show in 2022. “I want to go dig that up so bad.”

“I don't know whose damn idea that was.”

She also shared that “it's a really good song,” so it's a shame we'll have to wait so long to hear it! But what a treat that day will be.

“Hopefully it'll be special,” she added. “I have to honestly say, it was an odd feeling to be asked to write a song that was not going to be heard ‘til [2045]. But it's a good song.”

Speaking to Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show in the same year, Parton held out a glimmer of hope that she might still be around for its release.

"I won’t be around to hear it,” she said. "I’ll be dead and gone—well I might not be, 'cause I’ll be 99.

"You know me, I might still be hoppin’ around.”

Did Dolly Parton write two of her biggest tracks within 24 hours?

Parton's music has spanned generations. She recorded her first song in 1959 when she was just 13 and 67 years later, she still has 16.2million monthly listeners on Spotify, with billions of listens in total.

Two of her biggest tracks are 'Jolene' and 'I Will Always Love You' – covered by Whitney Houston in The Bodyguard – and there is a belief that she wrote them both on the same day in 1972.

“That was a good writing day!” Parton said herself on The Bobby Bones Show in 2018.

Given her immense talent and relentless output, that wouldn't be surprising. However, reflecting on the story in 2022, she cast doubt on whether it was actually true.

“Well, I don’t really know if they were written in the same night," she told TED.

"When we found an old tape, they were on the same cassette. That could have been a few days apart. "But they also wound up on the same album. They were certainly written within a very short span of time.”