Dolly Parton’s estate has announced DollyFest, a two-city festival in London and Nashville that it says will honour the late country singer’s life and legacy and stand in place of a traditional public memorial.

The event will be staged over two consecutive weekends in 2027, with specific dates to be announced later, according to the estate’s Monday statement reported by the BBC. The decision gives Parton’s family and organisers a different form of remembrance from the usual memorial service and reflects, they said, the artist’s own wishes about how she should be celebrated.

According to the report, Parton had once imagined an earlier version of the festival as a live event she would host and perform at herself, but that original January 2026 plan was called off before it was ever publicly announced because of health struggles. The festival now being planned is framed as a posthumous tribute rather than a concert series attached to a living performer.

The estate said DollyFest would be “the party of a lifetime” that Parton wanted to share with the world. Organiser Danny Nozell, founder and chief executive of CTK Enterprises, said the aim was to let tributes unfold naturally while also building a festival-style event that felt authentic to the artist. He said Parton did not want a traditional memorial.

The BBC report said Parton died at the age of 80 on 25 August after a brief battle with cancer and was later laid to rest in a private family funeral in Nashville. The account also said she was placed next to her husband, Carl Dean, at Woodlawn Memorial Park and Mausoleum. Those details give the estate’s announcement a deeply personal context: the new festival is being positioned not just as an entertainment brand, but as the public expression of a private farewell.

Parton’s career made her one of country music’s most recognisable figures. The BBC described her as a singer, songwriter, philanthropist and businesswoman whose best-known songs included Coat of Many Colors, Jolene and I Will Always Love You. Over a seven-decade career, it said, she won 10 Grammy awards, sold more than 100 million records worldwide and wrote thousands of songs.

The announcement also drew immediate emotional reactions from fans and public figures. The report said tributes have flooded social media since her death, and that some observers treated the festival plan as consistent with the playful, generous public persona that Parton cultivated over decades.

For now, the estate’s message is that DollyFest will be a delayed but deliberate celebration: one that gives people time to grieve, time to organise, and time to turn admiration into a shared event. In that sense, the tribute seems designed to mirror the performer herself, mixing spectacle, affection and control over the story told in her name.