For most of the world, it was the loss of one of American music’s defining voices.

For Miley Cyrus, it was something more personal — the loss of the closest thing she’d ever had to a second mother.

The relationship traces back to the early 1990s, when Dolly and Billy Ray Cyrus, riding the enormous success of “Achy Breaky Heart,” toured together and became genuine friends — a Kentucky boy and a Tennessee girl who shared mountain roots and a love of country music.

Dolly wrote “Romeo” and invited Billy Ray to appear in the video; the two spent enough time together on the road that their professional relationship deepened into something closer to family.

When tabloids speculated in 1992 that the closeness was romantic, an embarrassed Billy Ray reportedly felt he owed Dolly an apology.

Her response became something close to legend: “Honey, this trash sells records” — a line that, rather than damaging the friendship, seemed to deepen his respect for her.

That same year, as Billy Ray and his wife, Tish, awaited their first daughter, he asked Dolly to be the child’s godmother.

She said yes — one more godchild added to an already enormous extended family, coming from a household of twelve siblings herself.

What might have been a small kindness became, by most accounts, one of the most meaningful relationships of Dolly’s life.

To understand why, it helps to understand what Dolly carried privately for decades.

She and husband Carl Dean had wanted children early in their marriage — they’d even picked a name, Carla, for a daughter — before endometriosis led to a partial hysterectomy at 36, closing that door permanently.

She’s said she carried a quiet sense of “what if” for years afterward, eventually arriving at a philosophy she repeated often: maybe she wasn’t meant to have children of her own so that everybody’s children could be hers instead.

That belief shaped both her extended-family relationships and, eventually, the Imagination Library.

Miley became one of the clearest expressions of that philosophy.

Dolly remained genuinely present throughout her childhood, culminating publicly in 2006 when she appeared as “Aunt Dolly” on Hannah Montana — a role that read as more than a typical celebrity cameo precisely because the warmth behind it was real, not performed.

As Miley grew into a controversial and heavily scrutinized young adult, Dolly never tried to shape her into a smaller version of herself and never publicly criticized her choices.

In 2014, amid intense backlash over Miley’s VMA performance and Bangerz era, Dolly told Time plainly that she wasn’t worried about her goddaughter, calling her smart and talented — a public defense at a moment when staying quiet would have been the safer, easier choice for anyone in the industry.

Their bond played out musically for years: Miley’s cover of “Jolene,” their 2017 co-write “Rainbowland,” a joint 2019 Grammys performance of “Jolene” as part of a career tribute to Dolly, and a shared appearance on Miley’s 2022 New Year’s Eve special.

To audiences, these looked like fun collaborations between two generations of country-adjacent stars.

To Miley, by all accounts, each one was simply time spent with someone she considered family.

When Dolly died, Miley’s tribute reflected the depth of that history.

She wrote on Instagram that losing her “Aunt Dolly” was beyond what she could put into words, that their most sacred moments would stay private, and that Dolly would want her to feel her grief, write a song about it, and keep going — closing with, “I have an angel beside me.

I always have.”

On X, she added shorter, rawer posts: that the world had lost one of the purest souls, and that Dolly had “transcended time.”

The following day, Miley was photographed arriving at a Los Angeles recording studio, visibly grieving but choosing, as she’d promised, to turn pain into music — a way of processing loss she’d watched Dolly model across three decades of songwriting.

Dolly’s own funeral wishes reflected the same instincts that defined her public life: private, deliberate, and generous.

She’d requested a small, family-only service, the hymn “If We Never Meet Again” rather than “I Will Always Love You” (the same song played at her father’s funeral in 2000), and — according to her nephew Bryan Seaver — a soft cotton dress rather than any of the glittering costumes she’d worn on stage for six decades.

She was expected to be laid to rest beside Carl Dean, who died in March 2025 after nearly sixty years of marriage.

In place of flowers, her family asked for donations to the Imagination Library, which had by then distributed more than 300 million free books to children worldwide.

She’d also, years earlier, recorded a song called “My Place in History,” deliberately sealed away until 2046 — the year she would have turned 100 — a decision that required real patience from a woman who knew she’d never hear the public’s reaction to it.

What Dolly leaves behind extends well past her catalog — “Jolene,” “9 to 5,” “Coat of Many Colors,”

“I Will Always Love You” — into the Imagination Library, inspired by her father’s own inability to read, and Dollywood, which turned the impoverished region of her childhood into a major regional employer.

And within her extended, chosen family, it includes Miley Cyrus: a woman who, by the time she stood on a Grammy stage in 2019 singing “Jolene” back to the woman who wrote it, had grown up entirely inside the kind of unconditional presence Dolly Parton spent her whole life giving to people who weren’t, strictly speaking, her own