Orville Peck was playing a solo concert at Rough Trade East in London on 25 August 2026 when he stopped to talk to the room about Dolly Parton, whose death at 80 had been announced a few hours earlier. He told the crowd he was a mess, that some of them had probably heard, and that what got him was how universally loved she had been and how plainly she stood for kindness. Then he opened the set with I Will Always Love You.
What he said next went further than a tribute usually does. Peck told the crowd he had never really thought about the idea of having a hero until her, and that as a gay man coming into country music and feeling alone in it, knowing she existed in the genre made it feel like he had a friend there. "Dolly was my hero," he said.
The performance itself was an acoustic guitar and a microphone. "We love Dolly and this is for her," he said, and then stayed close to the shape of Parton's original while pulling the whole thing down an octave into his baritone. The mask stayed on, as it always does, and by the third and final verse the strain in the voice was doing more work than the arrangement. Peck had sung the song in public once before, back in 2020.
Eight of his own songs followed: Out of Time, Already Gone, Hexie Mountains, Blush, Lafayette, Dead of Night, Kalahari Down and Daytona Sand. Parton wrote the one he opened with and put it out as a single in 1974. Whitney Houston recorded it for The Bodyguard in 1992 and turned it into one of the best-selling records ever released, which is the version most of the room would have grown up with.
The two of them were among several acts answering from the stage inside 48 hours. Jack White and Geese were others, and Geese worked her into two sold-out Glasgow shows on their way to Reading and Leeds. In Nashville the Grand Ole Opry handed a Saturday night over to her.
Parton died on 25 August at the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center in Nashville, her family said, after a short battle with cancer. Peck's own year runs on regardless: his album Mule is due on 18 September, with a North American tour behind it, and those dates sit with the rest of what we hold in the tour guide.
The facts
- Orville Peck played Rough Trade East in London on 25 August 2026
- He opened the nine-song set with I Will Always Love You
- He performed it alone on acoustic guitar, taking it down an octave
- Peck told the crowd Dolly Parton had been his hero
- He had covered the same song once before, in 2020
- Peck's album Mule is due on 18 September 2026
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