He just never knew how she felt about him … until now.
“I played it for her and she was like, look, you have my blessing to do whatever you need to do with this,” he remembers. “Everything that people say about her is true. She’s an amazing person.”
That was, until the afternoon he decided to share a freestyle rap with his friend as they sat at a stoplight.
“At times I would look him up on the internet and I just couldn’t believe how much I looked like my dad,” he remembers of his father, a well-known singer-songwriter known for Top 40 hits such as “Hold Me Like You Never Had Me” and “Shot Full of Love.” “We both had long hair way back when and he was tall like me.”
But two years ago, after receiving word that his father was stricken with cancer and didn’t have much longer to live, the father and son were committed to finding a way back to each other.
And while he didn’t hold on to anger, he did grant forgiveness.
“As we get older, we realize that he had much he was struggling with,” he explains. “It was not a reflection on me. My dad loved me the best that he could. And what is so beautiful about it now is that we got the best versions of ourselves at the best time for the right amount of time, you know?”
Randy Partondied on Jan. 21st of this yearat the age of 67.
“I was there with him that morning before he passed,” he remembers. “That’s the man my mom raised me to be, to show up for people and do things that you might not necessarily think you would do because you don’t want to live with that regret.”
Randy and Dolly Parton.AFF-USA/Shutterstock
“There was always something about his song ‘Tennessee Born’ that always really got to me,” he remembers. “I ended up sampling that track and recorded it and played it for him, and he was just over the moon. And he said to me, you need to do that with one of Dolly’s tracks.”
And so, he did.
source: people.com
