Listen to a 30-second preview of “Songwriter”:
Jesse Holliday is a country songwriter who wrote “Songwriter” as a tribute to Dolly Parton, describing her simply as “a great lady and singer.” In the artist’s own words, the song was written to honor not just Parton’s music, but her long career and her quiet generosity toward children who needed help learning to read.
The song traces a familiar country arc, a girl from the hills of East Tennessee who picks up a guitar and turns dreams into songs the whole world comes to know. Holliday’s lyrics move between celebration and mourning, marking fifty years of music making while sitting with the loss of a voice that shaped country music for generations. There is a gentleness in the writing, an old guitar, a coat of many colors, the sense of someone who “worked on every word and every rhyme.”
A Song Built on Gratitude
What comes through most in “Songwriter” is not just admiration for Parton’s catalog, but for what she did beyond the stage. Holliday’s lyrics return again and again to books placed in the hands of children, to a woman who “gave back to the hills where she’d begun.” It is a song about legacy measured in more than record sales, about how giving plants a seed that outlasts any one performer.
Musically and lyrically, this is straightforward country storytelling, the kind built for a Sunday afternoon or a long Texas drive, with simple, repeated choruses that let the sentiment settle in rather than rush past. It sits comfortably alongside the classic duets and heartfelt ballads that shaped the genre Holliday is honoring.
For a community station like Unity 89.1 FM, serving listeners across Corpus Christi, “Songwriter” fits naturally. It is a piece of music made by someone from the local and independent scene, written plainly and sincerely, about an artist whose influence reaches far beyond her own recordings. Jesse Holliday’s tribute is a small, heartfelt addition to that same tradition of songs that remember, and songs that give something back.
Find Jesse Holliday
“Songwriter” by Jesse Holliday is now in rotation on Unity 89.1 FM, Corpus Christi’s community radio station. Listen live at unity89fm.com.
