A recording of a teenage Dolly Parton singing on a small East Tennessee radio show has resurfaced from a Knoxville archive, offering a rare glimpse of the future superstar years before she signed her first record deal. The East Tennessee History Center shared the clip, which captures Parton performing on Tommy Covington's Hayloft Jamboree, a program broadcast out of Maryville sometime between 1960 and 1962, when she was roughly 14 to 16 years old.
The recording had sat unidentified for years inside a massive donation. According to the East Tennessee History Center, Covington, a musician and radio host who died in 2009, gave the archive 260 reel-to-reel audio tapes and 70 acetate discs shortly before his death, and the unlabeled Parton performance was buried among them. The tape is now cataloged as part of the Tennessee Archive of Moving Image and Sound, known as TAMIS, which was founded as an independent nonprofit in 2005 before being absorbed into the Knox County Public Library system in 2013. As reported by WATE 6 On Your Side, the History Center said preserving regional history is vital because the stories of people who are no longer alive depend on what was left behind.
In the clip, Parton plays guitar and sings “Another Just Like Me,” a song about a short-lived romantic interest who moved on to another girl. The radio show host on the recording is heard introducing her to people who wanted to see her, and later remarks that there will never be another like Dolly Parton, per the station's report. Covington's Hayloft Jamboree aired on WGAP-AM, a Maryville station that first went on the air on August 13, 1947, according to a Congressional Record entry.
From Cas Walker's Airwaves to the Grand Ole Opry
Parton's path to that Maryville microphone began years earlier and closer to home. The Sevier County native made her broadcasting debut at age 10 on Knoxville grocer and politician Cas Walker's “Farm and Home Hour,” which served as her main local performing venue for six to eight years, according to the Knoxville History Project. In July 1957, at age 11, she performed at the annual Hillbilly Homecoming outdoor festival in Maryville, sharing a lineup with Patsy Cline, Jim Reeves and Pee Wee King as one of Cas Walker's Entertainers.
By 1959, Parton had reached Nashville, earning three encores during her first Grand Ole Opry performance. Her big break came in 1962, when she and Bill Owens were signed to Tree Publishing and Mercury Records in Nashville. That signing led to her first single on a major label, according to the Library of Congress.
A Digitization Push Brings Old Tapes to New Audiences
The Hayloft Jamboree tape's public release fits into a broader effort by Knox County to get its archival holdings in front of modern audiences. In January, the Knox County Public Library began uploading digitized historical film and audio from TAMIS's collection to YouTube for free public access, per Knox TN Today. TAMIS operates out of the East Tennessee History Center, itself run by the East Tennessee Historical Society, a body established in 1834 that also operates the Museum of East Tennessee History inside the 1874 Customs House on Gay Street downtown.
The clip's emergence comes as tributes to Parton continue across the region following her death in late August. Parton, who became a musician, singer and philanthropist known worldwide, died at age 80 at Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center surrounded by loved ones. Her publicist said she bravely faced a brief battle with cancer.
A State Mourns and Remembers
Tennessee had already honored Parton earlier this year, when Governor Bill Lee proclaimed January 19, 2026, statewide “Dolly Parton Day” to mark her 80th birthday and celebrate her music and philanthropic work, including the Imagination Library. Since her death, the state has seen an outpouring of memorial gestures, from a petition to rename Nashville International Airport that gathered more than 90,000 signatures to a decades-old deed restriction blocking a similar rename at Knoxville's McGhee Tyson Airport.
Covington himself had deep roots in that same East Tennessee radio tradition. He began his career in the 1930s on WNOX-AM's Mid-Day Merry-Go-Round in Knoxville, a premier regional showcase that also featured early performances by Chet Atkins and the Everly Brothers, according to the East Tennessee History Center. That lineage, running from Cas Walker's grocery-store broadcasts to Covington's Hayloft Jamboree, helped preserve a formative chapter of Appalachian music history that might otherwise have vanished with the tapes themselves.
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