Dolly Parton. BRIDGET BENNETT/AFP via Getty Images
Dolly Parton made a bucket list wish come true for a terminally ill man in Utah.
The country music icon, 77, surprised LeGrand Gold when she called him on Friday, December 22, and serenaded him over the phone.
Gold, 48, was diagnosed with stage IV colorectal cancer in 2021. His illness spread to his lymph nodes and liver, and in September, he was given a prognosis of less than six months to live due to liver failure.
Gold has been a fan of Parton for his entire life and included meeting her on his bucket list, but he thought it was a dream that would not come true. ‘Well, it’s never going to happen,” he recalled in an interview with KSL-TV published on Friday.
Emma McIntyre/Getty Images Dolly Parton must work longer than 9 to 5 to balance her music and impressive charitable efforts. In 2022, Parton was honored with the Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy for her decades of good deeds and gushed over how “proud” she was to receive the recognition. Her acts of kindness include the creation […]
Gold’s wife, Alice, previously sent a message to Parton via social media asking her to fulfill her husband’s wish to meet her.
Then the magical call came from his idol.
“Hey LG, it’s Dolly P. I’ve heard you’ve been a fan of mine for many years, and I just wanted to thank you for that,” Parton told Gold over the phone.
“I’m just happy that we got to kind of have our journey together in this lifetime,” she continued. “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.”
As Gold glowed while listening to Parton on the phone, the 10-time Grammy winner continued by singing a snippet of one of her most famous songs.
“Just know that I will always love you,” Parton said, quoting the title of her 1973 classic that was rerecorded by Whitney Houston in 1992 for The Bodyguard soundtrack. “I should’ve sung that, shouldn’t I?” Parton asked. She then sang some of the tune, changing her famous lyric to, “I will always love LG.”
“She sang me a song, put my name in the song,” Gold said. “I feel like I’m immortal now.”
After hoping to connect with Parton for many years, the phone call brought Gold some much-needed joy.
“It was really cool,” Gold said. “It made me feel good.”
Gold, his wife and their five children have visited Parton’s Dollywood theme park in Tennessee several times. The couple also read books to their kids sent to them through Parton’s free book gifting program, Imagination Library.
“From the time a child is born until they go to kindergarten, every month she mails out books,” Gold told KSL-TV earlier this month. “She does stuff like that [that] I think is really cool.”
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Alice told People that their entire family is ecstatic over Parton’s unbelievable call.
“We’ve been flying above the silver lining for days,” she said. “Out of the 11 items [on the list], we thought Dolly would be the impossible, but true to Dolly form, she once again reminds the world that dreams really do come true.”