Kacey Musgraves sings 'I Will Always Love You' for Dolly Parton at 2026 VMAs
Kacey Musgraves performed Dolly Parton’s ‘I Will Always Love You’ at the 2026 VMAs as a tribute to Parton, who died on 25 August at age 80. Pitchfork reported the performance from the ceremony.
The VMAs are MTV’s annual awards for music videos. A performance in the main ceremony is played live to the room and broadcast to viewers at home, which gives a tribute a wide audience in a single evening.
Parton’s death prompted remembrance across country music. Musgraves answered in the way touring singers often do, by adding the songs of the artist they are honouring into their own sets.
Since Parton’s death, she has covered Parton’s music at multiple stops on her Middle of Nowhere tour. A cover, in live terms, is simply another writer’s song performed by the singer on stage that night.
At a Boston show on that tour, she chose ‘Here You Come Again’. At Madison Square Garden in New York, she chose ‘9 to 5’. Each is a Parton original, written and first recorded by Parton herself.
For fans following the tour, this means the VMA performance was part of a pattern rather than a single gesture. The awards show put on television what audiences in Boston and New York had already heard in the concert hall.
Musgraves was in the building as a nominee as well as a performer. Her video for ‘Dry Spell’, taken from Middle of Nowhere, was nominated for Best Country Music Video, the VMAs category that groups country clips together.
She arrived at this year’s ceremony without a previous VMA win. Her record before 2026 stood at two nominations, both received in 2022 for Star Crossed: The Film.
Those earlier nominations were for Best Longform Video, the award for extended video projects rather than a single three-minute clip, and Best Art Direction, which credits the look of the sets and visual design. Both recognised a film-length companion to her music rather than a standard single release.
The 2026 appearance therefore served two purposes in one night. It placed her current work from Middle of Nowhere before voters, and it gave her a slot in the industry’s farewell to an 80-year-old songwriter whose songs she had already been carrying on the road.
