By 1999, Dolly Parton had nothing left to prove. Yet somehow, she found herself with something to demonstrate anyway.

Of course, she had been there before.

There was her decision to step away from Porter Wagoner and build a career entirely her own. Her audacious leap toward pop when country music alone could no longer contain her ambitions. Or perhaps simply the nerve to be Dolly Parton at all: a woman with an unwavering understanding of self and a vision to match, navigating an industry and a world often designed to deny women entry unless they agreed to someone else's terms.

Parton rarely did. This was, after all, the eye-on-the-prize businesswoman who walked away from the opportunity to have Elvis Presley record ‘I Will Always Love You’ rather than surrender her publishing rights. She understood something early that would define the rest of her career: knowing your worth sometimes means being willing to say no, even when the person on the other side is the King of Rock and Roll.

Yet by the end of the 1990s, while the circumstances had changed, the challenge hadn't. Country radio had spent much of the decade slowly drifting away from Parton, leaving one of its greatest architects searching for her place within a genre she helped build. Then, just months after the release of severely underrated album Hungry Again, Decca Records shuttered its Nashville office, leaving Parton without a record label for the second time in a year.

Nashville might not have known what to do with Dolly Parton anymore. But Parton always had a plan and an open heart for her first love: the song.

Over dinner with producer Steve Buckingham that summer, Parton learned that bluegrass fans had been aching for her to make a bluegrass record. The answer should have been obvious. Long before the movies, pop crossovers and Dollywood, there were the mountains of East Tennessee and the music that had surrounded her since childhood.

Alongside this, perhaps for the first time in a long time, there was nobody standing in her way. Parton managed herself. She had her own label. She could make whatever record she damn well pleased. So she did what mountain folk do when they needed a reset. She went home.

Within weeks, Parton and Buckingham had assembled a staggering collection of bluegrass talent, including the likes of Jerry Douglas, Alison Krauss and Rhonda Vincent. Together, they tore through songs Parton had carried with her for much of her life, alongside a few wonderfully unexpected choices.

There was the ancient ache of ‘Silver Dagger’ and the heartstring-plucking title track. She reclaimed ‘Steady as the Rain,’ a song she had originally written for her sister Stella, and revisited ‘Will He Be Waiting for Me’ from her own 1972 catalog. She even pulled Billy Joel and Southern rockers Blackfoot into the mountains, reshaping their songs through her unmistakable sound.

Released on October 26, 1999, The Grass Is Blue didn't sound like an aging superstar desperately searching for relevance. It sounded like an artist suddenly liberated from having to search for it at all. This was always one of Parton's most enviable superpowers: she knew who she was, even when the world around her couldn't quite figure out what to do with her.

Critics noticed. Audiences did too. Most importantly, bluegrass embraced a voice that sounded as though it had always belonged there. The Grass Is Blue ultimately won the Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album, while ‘Travelin' Prayer’ earned Parton another nomination for Best Female Country Vocal Performance.

The album also arrived just before bluegrass experienced a remarkable cultural resurgence. Alison Krauss was already expanding the music's audience, and O Brother, Where Art Thou? would soon send mountain music spilling unexpectedly into the mainstream.

But Dolly didn't need a revival to find her way there.

For all the transformations of her career, the songwriter behind the sparkling sense of humor and dazzling rhinestones had never traveled particularly far from the girl raised in the Smoky Mountains. When Nashville seemed ready to decide that Dolly Parton's moment had passed, she didn't chase the future.

She reached backward and reminded everyone where she came from.

As we collectively mourn Parton's passing, perhaps The Grass Is Blue offers one more of the many lessons she so generously left behind. This wasn't a singular act of reinvention, but one of dozens upon dozens of moments when Parton invited us into her world and showed us the power of knowing exactly who you are, even when the world insists you should be something else.

Parton spent a lifetime reaching for stars that must have once seemed impossibly far away from the mountains of East Tennessee. Somehow, she caught them. But perhaps her greatest gift was convincing the rest of us that we might be able to reach them, too.