When Kacey Musgraves steps onto the MTV Video Music Awards stage this Sunday, she will not simply be returning to one of music’s biggest televised events after a five-year absence. She will be there for one specific reason: to honor Dolly Parton, the woman whose death left Kacey struggling to explain just how much country music had lost.
MTV and CBS have confirmed that Musgraves will perform a special tribute to Dolly at the 2026 MTV Video Music Awards on September 27. The appearance will be especially notable because country performances remain relatively rare on the main VMAs broadcast, making the decision to devote a special performance to Dolly a reflection of just how far her influence extended beyond Nashville.
The exact song Kacey will perform has not yet been announced.
That mystery may make the moment even more emotional.
In the weeks since Dolly’s death, Kacey has already been finding ways to bring her music into arenas around the country. During her Middle of Nowhere tour, she performed “Here You Come Again” in Boston and later incorporated “9 to 5” into her tribute moments, making it clear that these were not casual covers. They were songs chosen to remember someone Kacey considered foundational to country music.
At Madison Square Garden, Kacey struggled to talk about Dolly without becoming emotional.
She told the audience that she was not over the loss and did not expect to be. Then she explained why Dolly’s death felt larger than the loss of another famous performer.
Kacey called her “a matriarch.”
She said the world had lost a light and described Dolly as the closest thing country music had to royalty. The comment was not simply about awards, record sales, or decades of fame. Kacey was talking about the role Dolly occupied for younger artists who had grown up seeing her as proof that a woman could be funny, glamorous, commercially successful, musically serious, generous, and completely herself at the same time.
That distinction is what makes Kacey an especially fitting artist to lead the VMAs tribute.
She and Dolly belonged to different generations, but there were obvious points of connection between them.
Both built careers inside country music while refusing to remain confined by what the genre expected from them.
Both understood the power of visual identity.
Both mixed sharp songwriting with humor.
And both proved that a country artist could reach audiences who rarely considered themselves country fans.
Kacey had also shared a stage with Dolly before.
At the 2019 Grammy Awards, she joined Dolly, Katy Perry and other artists for a celebration of Dolly’s music, including a performance of “Here You Come Again.” At that time, Dolly stood onstage beside the younger artists being influenced by her.
The VMAs performance will be painfully different.
This time Dolly will not be there.
That changes the meaning of everything.
A song that once represented admiration in Dolly’s presence now becomes remembrance in her absence.
That shift has already been visible in Kacey’s concerts since August.
Shortly after Dolly died, Kacey wrote that the world suddenly felt “a lot less sparkly.” She also found comfort in imagining Dolly reunited with her husband, Carl Dean, who died in 2025. The reaction was brief, personal, and noticeably less polished than the kind of formal tribute celebrities often issue after a death.
It sounded like grief.
Then Kacey began putting that grief into music.
In Boston, she brought “Rainbow” back into her set and dedicated it to Dolly before moving into “Here You Come Again.” Images of Dolly appeared behind her as the audience sang along, turning a Kacey Musgraves concert into something closer to a communal memorial.
That may offer a clue about what viewers can expect from the VMAs even though the actual song remains secret.
Kacey does not appear to be approaching Dolly’s death as a chance for a flashy celebrity moment.
She has been treating it as something personal.
And the VMAs are giving her an unusually large stage on which to do that.
The awards show has traditionally leaned heavily toward pop, hip-hop, and visually ambitious performances. Country music has appeared over the years, but it is not normally the center of the evening.
Dolly, however, had spent her entire career crossing those boundaries.
She was a country songwriter whose music reached pop radio.
She became a film star.
She recorded rock music.
She collaborated with generations of performers who came from completely different genres.
Her songs traveled much further than the industry category attached to them.
A Dolly Parton tribute at the VMAs therefore makes a certain kind of sense.
She belonged to country music.
But country music never completely contained her.
Kacey occupies a similar position in a younger generation. Her work has won major country awards while also finding audiences in pop, indie, fashion, and festival culture.
That makes the coming performance feel less like one country singer honoring another and more like a younger artist acknowledging one of the women who made that freedom possible.
The 2026 VMAs will also include other memorial performances, including a tribute to George Michael, but Kacey’s appearance will carry a different kind of immediacy.
Dolly died only weeks ago.
The grief is still fresh.
The tributes are still unfolding.
And artists who actually knew her are still figuring out what it means to walk onto stages where Dolly once stood.
Kacey Musgraves now gets one of the biggest of those moments.
She will not be sharing the stage with Dolly as she did in 2019.
She will not be introducing another song before Dolly walks out.
This time, the performance itself belongs to the memory.
The woman Kacey called “a matriarch” will be the reason she is there at all.
And whatever song she chooses, that may be what makes the performance impossible to hear the same way again.