At the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, Zac Brown’s duet with Dolly Parton was completed by a pre-recorded vocal. The night’s best moments were built around the space she left.
Zac Brown’s performance at Belmont University’s Fisher Center for the Performing Arts on Wednesday depended on a voice that was not in the room. Singing “Butterfly,” the ballad he recorded as a duet with Dolly Parton for his 2025 album Love & Fear, Brown was joined on the chorus by Parton’s pre-recorded vocal: “Butterfly, you will see / You’re so much stronger than you think you are / You just have to believe.”
The stage carried the song’s imagery literally, down to a large flower arrangement and butterflies suspended above the audience. The occasion was CMA Presents I Will Always Love You: A Celebration of Dolly Parton, broadcast on ABC and streaming on Hulu from Oct. 22, with proceeds going to Parton’s Imagination Library. Ella Langley took on “Jolene,” the 1974 hit she had first played live in Auburn, Alabama, shortly after Parton’s death. Brad Paisley, Carrie Underwood and Vince Gill were also on the bill.
Brown has done this before. Days after Parton died in August, he and his band gave “Butterfly” its concert debut at Forest Hills Stadium, telling the crowd, “There will never be another human, there will never be another Dolly Parton.” Then as now, the recording carried the other half of the duet.
That is what the evening kept returning to: a stage crowded with singers, and one fixed gap where the guest of honor should have been standing.
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