Dolly Parton's Bound to Ride arrives on Stanley Brothers tribute album

Dolly Parton's first posthumous release is out. "Bound to Ride," credited to Dolly Parton & The First Ladies of Bluegrass, was issued on Wednesday, Sept. 9, two weeks after her death at 80. Rolling Stone premiered the recording.

The track appears on "Where the Soul Never Dies: Celebrating 80 Years of The Stanley Brothers," a 12-track collection due Oct. 16 on Compass Records. Banjoist Alison Brown and bassist Garry West, the husband-and-wife team behind the label, produced the album and timed it to the Stanley Brothers' long-delayed induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame.

Parton died on Aug. 25 at 80. Her estate announced the death that day and said it followed "a brief battle with cancer." The type has not been disclosed. Tributes came from peers and fans who weighed her impact on the industry and cited hits including "9 to 5," "I Will Always Love You" and "Jolene," TODAY reported. Her vocal for "Bound to Ride" had been recorded years earlier, around 2022.

Recorded alone during a Covid surge

Almost every track on the album was recorded live in the studio, Rolling Stone reported, but the producers made an exception for Parton. During a Covid surge circa 2022, she recorded her vocal alone at her own studio. The First Ladies of Bluegrass had laid down a backing track for her separately, and she sang to that track.

The team did not know what her session would yield. West called the result "the full Dolly" and told Rolling Stone that the producers were caught off guard by how far her vocal went beyond what they had hoped for.

We didn't know what we would get back, and she really did over-deliver. We were shocked. We couldn't have gotten anything better.

Her performance is threaded with ad libs. Billboard noted that she calls out "pick it, girls!" and names the musicians as they move into their solos, and described the finished track as lively and cohesive despite the separate sessions behind it. Parton named each of the First Ladies of Bluegrass during the song, which left the players deeply moved, according to Rolling Stone.

The band had rebuilt the song before Parton sang a note of it. The First Ladies rearranged "Bound to Ride" and added a newly written eight-bar bridge drawn from an obscure verse, working up the version while masked around a studio coffee table. Fiddle player Becky Buller sang a scratch vocal in the band's best guess at Parton's key.

The First Ladies of Bluegrass

The group on the recording is Brown on banjo, Buller on fiddle, Sierra Hull on mandolin, Missy Raines on bass and Molly Tuttle on guitar. They are billed with Parton on the single, which sits second in the album's 12-track running order.

Parton grew up playing bluegrass and, early in her career, released a cover of Jimmie Rodgers' "Mule Skinner Blues," a 1930 country blues that Bill Monroe had turned into a bluegrass standard, Billboard reported. She kept returning to the music, cutting three albums for Sugar Hill Records: The Grass Is Blue in 1999, which won a Grammy, Little Sparrow in 2001 and Halos & Horns in 2002.

"Bound to Ride" is a traditional number, and the Stanley Brothers helped popularize it with a 1964 recording. The duo performed together from the 1940s through the 1960s.

Carter and Ralph Stanley started out in the mid-1940s and, with their band the Clinch Mountain Boys, combined the string-band music of Bill Monroe with the mountain ballads and church singing they had learned in southwestern Virginia, plus harmonies modeled on the Carter Family. Carter Stanley died in 1966, at 41. Ralph Stanley led the Clinch Mountain Boys for another 50 years, until his death in 2016.

How the tribute album came together

Industry veteran J. Tayloe Emery conceived the project with Ralph Stanley's son, Ralph Stanley II, and brought it to Brown and West at Compass Records, Rolling Stone reported. The couple produced every track themselves, cutting live at their Nashville headquarters, the former Glaser Brothers studio, where outlaw country got its name. Brown's banjo turns up on most of the album, a frequency she joked about to Rolling Stone.

I'm the best in my price range.

Willie Nelson's contribution also came together remotely. He first sent back a track on which he simply harmonized with the guide vocal. After the producers asked his longtime producer, Buddy Cannon, to take another shot at it, Nelson recorded a strong lead vocal and a guitar solo. West then decided the song had room for another voice and a different generational take, and recruited Sierra Ferrell to turn it into a duet.

The Stanley Brothers will enter the Country Music Hall of Fame later this year as the Veterans Era artist in the class of 2026. Tim McGraw was named in the Modern Era category and Paul Overstreet as songwriter. The album's title counts 80 years from the duo's beginnings in the mid-1940s.

Stanley Brothers material is spread across country, bluegrass and Americana acts on the rest of the record. Willie Nelson and Sierra Ferrell take "I'll Fly Away," Jamey Johnson and Shawn Camp a stark "Rank Strangers to Me," Rhiannon Giddens and Dirk Powell "Little Birdie," and Dierks Bentley with Della Mae "How Mountain Girls Can Love." Steve Martin and Ed Helms perform "Pardon Me, Stranger," a new song Martin wrote with Brown that reworks a Stanley Brothers comedy routine.

What is on the Stanley Brothers tribute

Where the Soul Never Dies is due Oct. 16 on Compass Records and is open for preorder. The full track list, as published by Billboard:

1. "If I Lose," Billy Strings and Drew Emmitt
2. "Bound to Ride," Dolly Parton and The First Ladies of Bluegrass
3. "Rank Strangers to Me," Jamey Johnson and Shawn Camp
4. "Ridin' That Midnight Train," Jim Lauderdale and The Travelin' McCourys
5. "I'll Fly Away," Willie Nelson and Sierra Ferrell
6. "Mother No Longer Awaits Me at Home," Ralph Stanley II and Tim O'Brien with The Clinch Mountain Boys
7. "Think of What You've Done," Nitty Gritty Dirt Band with Alison Brown
8. "Little Birdie," Rhiannon Giddens and Dirk Powell
9. "How Mountain Girls Can Love," Dierks Bentley and Della Mae
10. "Pardon Me, Stranger," Steve Martin and Ed Helms with Alison Brown
11. "Ralph's Banjo Special," Kristin Scott Benson, Gena Britt, Alison Brown
12. "Going Up Home to Live in Green Pastures," I'm With Her (Aoife O'Donovan, Sarah Jarosz, Sara Watkins)

At least one more unreleased Parton recording is known to exist. "My Place in History," a song she wrote in 2015, has been placed in a lockbox at Dollywood's DreamMore Resort in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, with instructions from Parton that it stay sealed for 30 years, putting it at 2045 or, by some accounts, her 100th birthday on Jan. 19, 2046.

Parton's longtime manager, Danny Nozell, put out a list of the projects she had been working on. In a press release, he said she had spent several years building a plan with a team she handpicked, a roadmap he said would guide her team's work for decades.

Dolly worked up until the day she died. She loved seeing her dreams come to life, and loved knowing her work brought people joy.

The projects Nozell listed include Dolly Dolls, Dolly's Cup Of Ambition Coffee, Dolly's Dog Treats and her Broadway musical. He said more details would follow soon on an avatar show, a biopic, a docuseries, a scripted series and a Billy The Kid animated series, and said anything released on Parton's official channels carries her personal stamp, TODAY reported.

Back to her mountain roots

The recording points back to the Appalachian music and traditional bluegrass sound that shaped Parton's early musical identity. Rolling Stone described the song as taking her back to her deepest mountain roots.

The producers want listeners to hear how much country, bluegrass and Americana owe the Stanley Brothers, whose influence ran to artists from Bob Dylan to Bruce Springsteen. West told Rolling Stone that a lot of the duo's material is now "just in the ether," taken for granted and played so often in pickup bands that he would bet many of the musicians do not know the songs' origins.

Parton's "Bound to Ride" is out now, posted to YouTube ahead of the album's Oct. 16 release. It is the only track on the record on which she appears, and the first piece of new music from the body of work her team says she left behind.