Jewel and Dolly Parton Reflect on Similar Childhoods in ‘My Father’s Daughter’ [Listen]

Folk-country singer-songwriter Jewel has been getting back in the saddle with music, and she’s releasing a poignant duet with the one and only Dolly Parton as her new single, titled “My Father’s Daughter."

The ballad, written back in 2008, is a reflection on the artist’s heritage and childhood. Jewel has been performing the song for years, but finally found a place for it on her new record Picking Up the Pieces, released Sept. 11.

She says choosing Parton for the duet was easy, as the two share a common background and Parton had always been a hero for Jewel growing up.

"When you grow up as a girl on a homestead with an outhouse, you don’t have many heroes in the public eye. Dolly and Loretta [Lynn] were them, because they had outhouses and they had a similar lifestyle to me," Jewel explains to Time. “I loved their audacity. They were women who were so outspoken and they had no shame in being who they were. They were so ahead of their time, and I always thought it was quite heroic. So I asked [Dolly] to sing on the song, and I was pretty surprised she said yes. I’m tremendously honored."

The singer was taken with Parton’s charming demeanor upon arriving to the studio to record. "We got in the studio, she started at 8AM and was 10 minutes early and well-prepared and looked amazing and was sarcastic and witty and everything you would hope Dolly Parton would be,” Jewel gushes.

The full song can be heard in the video above.

Picking Up the Pieces is intended to be a sort of bookend to Jewel’s debut album, Pieces of You, and stems from much of the hardship she has endured as of late, particularly after her divorce from her husband of six years in July of 2014.

“I was going through a divorce, and looking at my entire person and saying, what is my essential self? I don’t think there was an area of my life that wasn’t touched,” she says of her new music and memoir, titled Never Broken - Songs Are Only Half the Story, which was released Sept. 15.

Jewel was also recently in the studio with songwriting buddy Kip Moore, but no word yet on what they were up to, as neither Moore’s record Wild Ones nor Picking Up the Pieces features a duet between the two.

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