After several months of silence, Elle King has addressed her controversial Dolly Parton tribute performance at the Grand Ole Opry in January.
During the performance, which took place on Dolly Parton’s 78th birthday and featured a myriad of tributes, Elle King arrived drunk and slurred her way through a rendition of Parton’s “Marry Me.” “I don’t know the lyrics to these things in this fucking town/ Don’t tell Dolly ‘cus it’s her birthday” she told the audience before confessing, “I’m not even gonna fucking lie… y’all bought tickets for this shit, you ain’t getting your money back. And I’m gonna tell you one thing more: Hi, my name is Elle King, I’m fucking hammered.”
Now, King has discussed the incident for the first time on Chelsea Handler’s Dear Chelsea podcast. King initially expressed that she wasn’t supposed to perform at the tribute all until an unnamed headliner backed out last minute because of a major snowstorm. At the same time, King said she was in the midst of dealing with something “very heavy and traumatic” — she added she hadn’t ate or slept for days, and the day of the performance “was a really big day dealing with what I was going through and that I’m still going through.”
“I suffer from severe PTSD; I take one shot too many, and I’m just not there in my body, I’m not there,” King explained. “I don’t remember it. All I remember — I don’t even remember what I said. I know now what I said.”
She told Handler that when she came onstage, she was “totally 100 percent disassociated,” and when she came to in her dressing room, she remembers sobbing on the floor and thinking “What have I done?”
Though she declined to elaborate on what she was going through at the time, King did apologize for her behavior and took responsibility for having too much to drink. “Maybe I shouldn’t have fucking been drinking… This is like a sacred stage and I fucked up,” she said. “So, for all the people who are asking for an apology from me, hey, if you were there that night and I didn’t get a chance to say I’m sorry to you, I apologize.”
She also claimed she wrote a handwritten apology to Parton, who called her back a few days later. “She just gave me really kind words and told me, ‘Well, Dolly’s not mad at you, why should the world be?’” King said. “That’s the kindness from women, you know? That’s the stuff that I’ve received that I’ll never forget, ever. Because I wanted to fucking die. I had to remove myself from the population for a while because it just… wasn’t getting any better.”
Though King had rescheduled a series of tour dates as a result of the backlash, Parton herself offered some grace and support to King back in February. “She’s a great girl. And she’s been going through a lot of hard things lately. And she just had a little too much to drink. So let’s just forgive that and forget it and move on ’cause she felt worse than anybody ever could.”
King did make her return to the stage late last month at California’s Stagecoach Festival, and she’s feeling more motivated by the debacle than embarrassed. “I’m not grateful for it, but at the same time, I can find a silver lining in literally anything,” she told Handler. “I’m going to choose to use this as a tool to not defeat me, but to make me, hopefully, a better person, and I can learn from my mistakes.”
Listen to the Dear Chelsea podcast episode with Elle King below, with her comments regarding the Dolly Parton Tribute coming up around the 18th minute.