The Nashville airport board has unanimously voted to begin renaming the city’s airport after Dolly Parton, the legendary Tennessee-born singer who died two weeks ago.
The state-controlled Metropolitan Nashville Airport Authority approved the motion Friday at a board meeting where members praised the music icon, according to the authority’s proceedings. The change would make Parton, 79, the first woman to have her name on one of America’s 50 busiest airports.
Airport officials said the renaming could take a year or more and involves working with Parton’s estate to determine how they might split profits from merchandise sales, among other matters.
Lydia Popovich, a Parton superfan who started a petition for the name change in 2025, attended Friday’s meeting and spoke in favor of the proposal. She was in tears after the unanimous vote.
“It’s been a really beautiful experience, especially as you’re grieving someone that was such a great loss,” Popovich said. “She’s the best of Tennessee. She’s the best of the humans on the planet. She was this magical person that provided light and guidance to all of us.”
Popovich added: “Unfortunately she’s left us, but now we get to celebrate her and get to tell the world how much Tennessee loved her.”
The petition Popovich launched has gathered more than 175,000 signatures since Parton’s death, though officials competing to run the airport appeared eager to move forward even without the public push.
The vote comes amid an unusual political backdrop. Two separate Metropolitan Nashville Airport Authorities currently exist — one run by the state, the other controlled by the city — a bifurcated system created in 2023 during a partisan dispute between Tennessee’s Republican-dominated state government and Nashville’s Democratic city leadership. Control of the airport has been contested ever since, with competing boards taking turns at the helm as courts issue and overturn rulings.
Despite that acrimony, Nashville’s Democratic Mayor Freddie O’Connell and the competing city-controlled board also support the name change, according to O’Connell spokesman Alex Apple.
“The FAA’s going to get two votes from two boards, both in favor,” Apple said.
Stuart McWhorter, a member of the state-controlled board and deputy to Tennessee’s Republican Gov. Bill Lee, briefly mentioned the governance dispute at Friday’s meeting. He suggested that in the spirit of Parton “we can get beyond the litigation and get back to working together.”
Parton herself had previously resisted such honors. Popovich said Friday that Parton had gracefully batted down the idea of naming the airport after her, as she did with many other proposed honors during her lifetime. That included a 2021 bill by Tennessee lawmakers to place a statue of her on the Capitol grounds. Parton asked lawmakers to withdraw that bill but expressed a hope that it might happen “somewhere down the road several years from now or perhaps after I’m gone if you still feel I deserve it.”
Born in poverty in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains, Parton became an icon whose popularity crossed generational, geographic and political boundaries. In addition to writing and recording hit songs such as “Jolene” and “I Will Always Love You,” she starred in Hollywood films including “9 to 5” and “Steel Magnolias.”
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