Watch Dolly Parton Serenade a Fan With Cancer to Fulfill His Bucket List Wish
Written by Hannah Dailey on December 28, 2023
Dolly Parton just made a deserving fan’s wish come true. Two years after a Utah man named LeGrand Gold made a bucket list in the midst of battling stage four colorectal cancer, the 77-year-old country star made one of his wildest dreams come true by serenading him over the phone.
The bittersweet moment was captured in a video posted to YouTube, showing Gold lying in bed as Parton chats with him over speakerphone. “I’m just happy to know I’ve got a fan that devoted and that I’ve had a chance to walk that journey all these years,” Parton tells Gold in the video. “I heard you’ve been a fan of mine for many years, and I just want to thank you for that.”
“I’m just happy that we got to kind of have our journey together in this lifetime,” she continues. “I always want to make people happy with my music and with the things I do and the things I say and I’m just happy to know that I’ve touched your life in some way. So thank you for honoring me with that.”
The 10-time Grammy winner is fresh off the release of her debut rock album Rockstar, which debuted at No. 3 on the Billboard 200 last month and follows her 2022 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. To close out her conversation with Gold, she sang a snippet of one of her most famous compositions, adding in his nickname at the end. “I will always love you, I always love LG,” she crooned.
The Utah man explained to local media that after receiving his cancer diagnosis in 2021, he and his wife, Alice, took a pen to a napkin to list out his biggest dreams as a way of keeping hopes high. The No. 7 item was to meet the “9 to 5″ singer — “I thought, ‘Well, it’s never going to happen,’” he told KSL, a local NBC affiliate.
“She sang me a song, put my name in the song,” he added. “I feel like I’m immortal now.”
Watch the sweet moment below.