Sally Field opened the Emmys tribute to Dolly Parton on Monday with a speech built around one blunt line: “If there are truly angels on Earth, then we just lost one: Dolly Parton.” Reba McEntire followed with a musical tribute, turning the segment into a two-part salute to a performer whose death at age 80 last month set the frame for the night.
Steel Magnolias and Monday
Field said she had worked with Parton in Steel Magnolias, then described her as “genuine and humble, supportive and blisteringly funny, with a bawdy sense of humor that would send any rude guy looking for a place to hide.” She also called Parton “a humanitarian whose contributions have made a profound difference in the lives of so many in her home state of Tennessee, and across our country.”
The speech mattered because it came from someone who had shared a film set with Parton, not just a presenter reading a standard awards-script elegy. Field closed with, “God bless you, Dolly Parton, my friend. I am not the only one on Earth that will love you forever and ever,” which gave the segment a private tone before the show moved to the performance.
Reba McEntire sings 1983
McEntire’s tribute drew from Parton’s 1983 song Appalachian Mountains, and the broadcast paired it with an archival clip of Parton introducing the song the year it came out. In that clip, Parton said, “I’m very, very proud of the fact that I had the kind of parents that I did, and grew up in the Smoky Mountains, the Appalachian Mountains.”
She added, “And I have written a song that touches me very deep, and I’m sure that, in your own way, that you certainly will relate to this,” then, “This song, like I say, is very important to me, and I hope you like it,” before landing on the line, “It’s a song that I call ‘Appalachian Mountains.’”
Parton’s TV history
The archive also pulled the tribute back into Parton’s longer television run, which began when she was 10 on Cas Walker Farm and Home Hour and broke through 11 years later on the Porter Wagoner Show. That arc made the Emmys segment feel less like a one-night memorial and more like a network-era shorthand for how long Parton has sat inside the American TV machine.
Last month’s death at age 80 gave the segment its urgency, but the structure did the work: a spoken remembrance, a live performance, then a clip that let Parton speak for herself. That is the cleanest way to honor a figure whose public life was already built across music, film, and television.
