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“Islands in the Stream” is a song written by the Bee Gees and recorded by American country music artists Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton. It was released in August 1983 as the first single from Rogers’s fifteenth studio album Eyes That See in the Dark. The Bee Gees released a live version in 1998 and a studio version in 2001.

The song reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in the United States, giving each of Rogers and Parton their second pop number-one hit (after Rogers’s “Lady” in 1980 and Parton’s “9 to 5” in 1981). It also topped the Country and Adult Contemporary charts. In 2005 the song topped Country Music Television‘s poll of the best country duets of all time; Parton and Rogers reunited to perform the song on a CMT special. As of May 2023, it has been triple certified Platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America for three million certified units.

Named after the 1970 novel by Ernest Hemingway, the song was originally written for Diana Ross in an R&B style but later reworked for the duet by Rogers and Parton.

It has been claimed that the song was also intended for Marvin Gaye. This is attributed to a 2001 Good Morning America interview with the Bee Gees. When Barry Gibb said the song was written for Ross, Robin Gibb interrupted and said, “No, we wrote it for Marvin Gaye … We sent it to him but he was dead so it was a bit difficult for him to sing it.”  Gaye actually died in 1984, a year after the recording.  Separately, Robin Gibb has said the song was stylistically written “… as a Tamla kind of soul song in a Marvin Gaye type feel”, though not asserting it was for Gaye.  In other interviews, Barry Gibb has always maintained that Ross was the original artist for the song with no mention of Gaye.

For licensing reasons, the song was not included on the digital release of Eyes That See in the Dark from Capitol Records Nashville. Sony Music, the current owner of RCA Records, protected copyrights in the recording, which is digitally available only in various compilations from Sony Music, especially those of Dolly Parton.