Ahead of her 80th birthday, Dolly Parton revisited her twangy 1977 ballad, “Light of a Clear Blue Morning,” with an impressive group of friends in a new video. The clip features Lainey Wilson, Miley Cyrus, Queen Latifah, and Reba McEntire singing their parts in a recording studio.
The clip begins with Parton narrating, “You know, we’re living in troubled and uncertain times.” Latifah responds, “Yeah, we sure are.” Parton rejoins, “But we can’t let the darkness win.” Each artist takes turns, round-robin style, singing the verses, while David Foster plays piano. The new version includes a gospel choir, the Christ Church Choir, giving the song a peppy finish as the women all harmonize the chorus along with them. “Everything’s gonna be all right,” Parton says at the end, looking into the camera. “It’s gonna be OK.”
The artist teased the new clip with an Instagram reel, explaining she wrote the tune, on which she sings, “I can see the light of a clear blue morning” and “everything’s gonna be all right,” in 1976 when she “needed a little hope.” At the time, she was coming to terms with separating from her musical and business partner, Porter Wagoner. “This time around, I’ve invited some very special women, some real ‘shining lights’ to help me bring that hope to life again.”
“As I celebrate my 80th birthday, this new version is my way of using what I’ve been blessed with to shine a little light forward, especially by sharing it with some truly incredible women,” Parton echoed in another statement when the song came out. Net proceeds from the recording will benefit pediatric cancer research at Nashville’s Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt.
The song, which combined country, pop, and even gospel into one uplifting song, originally featured on Parton’s 18th solo studio album, New Harvest…First Gathering. Parton wrote the tune herself, but, like the new version, the album featured several notable guests including Roy Acuff, Chet Atkins, Minnie Pearl, Kitty Wells, and Ernest Tubb as backing vocalists. She re-recorded the song as a more upbeat, modern-sounding pop song for the Straight Talk movie soundtrack in 1992, and again in 2003 as a lush piano ballad for her post-9/11 patriotic album, For God and Country.
Cyrus, too, has a history with “Light of a Clear Blue Morning,” since she covered the song during a Saturday Night Live appearance in 2021. “Tomorrow is Mother’s Day, and this is for all the moms out there,” Cyrus said before the performance, which was a cold open.
