Dolly Parton may have a song called “Fresh Out of Forgiveness,” but the 78-year-old country music icon found some for Elle King anyway.
A month after King appeared at the Grand Ole Opry’s birthday tribute concert for Parton and declared onstage that she was “fucking hammered” and couldn’t remember the lyrics to the Parton song she was meant to be covering, Parton has finally shared her thoughts on the debacle.
“Elle is really a great artist, she’s a great girl,” Parton told Extra TV in an interview published Friday.
“She’s been going through a lot of hard things lately and she just had too much to drink, so let’s just forgive that and forget it and move on ’cause she felt worse than anybody ever could.”
Last month, King made headlines for her performance at the legendary Nashville venue. King was set to perform a cover of Parton’s “Marry Me,” but, in video captured at the event, appeared to forget the words, ad-libbing, “I don’t know the lyrics to these things in this fucking town… Don’t tell Dolly ‘cause it’s her birthday” over the music. She also declared, “I’ll tell you one thing more: Hi, my name is Elle King and I’m fucking hammered.”
On Twitter, the venue apologized in response to an audience member who took their complaints about the performance to the platform, writing, “Hi Judas, we deeply regret and apologize for the language that was used during last night’s second Opry performance.”
Parton, who was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2022 after initially rejecting the institution’s nomination, is notoriously firm in her convictions and morals: Take, for example, her large donations to medical research, her refusal to “go into that energy” when Bebe Rexha pitched her a duet on a song about heaven and hell, and her refusal to adopt texting as a method of communication because she simply doesn’t want to. Given her history of direct statements, if Parton’s telling the world to forget about the incident, she really means it.
After all, as she said while describing her anti-texting stance, life’s busy enough.
“I’ve got too much to think about than to clutter my mind up with everything else,” Parton said. And if she’s too busy to text, then she’s too busy to hold a grudge.
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