Dolly Parton has announced that she will no longer plan any further big tours. “I do not think I will ever tour again,” Parton boldly claimed in a new interview with Pollstar. “I’ll do special shows here and there, now and then. Maybe do a long weekend of shows or just a few shows at a festival. But I have no intention of going on a full-blown tour anymore,” she added. The country legend is still doing her thing at 76-years-old but wants to enjoy a simpler life with her husband, Carl Thomas Dean, as they get older.
Parton was speaking of touring, saying: “I’ve done that my whole life, and it takes so much time and energy. I like to stay a little closer to home with my husband. We’re getting older now, and I don’t want to be gone for four or five weeks at a time. Something could happen. I would not feel right about that if I were gone and somebody needed me. Or I would feel bad if I had to leave a tour if somebody got sick at home and needed me and then I had to walk out on the fans.”
Parton says her husband is who she is currently making new music for, and it is in the form of a rock and roll album. She has been married to Dean since 1966. “When I got nominated for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, I thought, well, no better time to do it.’ I had always wanted to do it. My husband is a big hard rock ’n’ roll fan, and for years I thought, ‘One of these days I’d like to do an album mainly just for him, just to kind of do it,'” says Parton.
While the musician is busy with new music, she is also hard at work for a Christmas “special” as she calls it, for NBC. “It’s a show within a show. What we’re doing is focused on the dramatic side. It’s showing all the things that go on while you’re putting together a show. All the arguments you have with the producers, all the problems you have with the artists, all the problems you have with scenery falling down and all the things that go on backstage, people having to cancel and reschedule real quick … I wouldn’t consider me acting, because I’m just totally myself in this. I’m just Dolly all the way, I’m not playing a character,” said Parton.
She is also in the works for a movie with famed actress turned producer Reese Witherspoon. The movie, which is adapted from the novel she co-wrote with author James Patterson, is called “Run, Rose, Run.”
In May, Parton was honored and inducted into the Hall of Fame, reported Fox News.