Dolly Parton breaks her silence on Elle King’s drunken Grand Ole Opry birthday tribute: Let’s ‘forget it’
Dolly Parton will always love you, Elle King.
The 78-year-old country icon finally addressed the “Ex’s & Oh’s” singer’s drunken birthday tribute at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, Tennessee.
“Elle is really a great artist,” Parton told “Extra” of King, 34, who told the audience last month that she was “f—king hammered” while performing Parton’s “Marry Me.”
“She’s a great girl, and she’s been going through of hard things lately,” Parton continued. “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 anyone ever could.”
The Post has contacted reps for King for comment.
King’s drunken performance quickly went viral on TikTok. Fan-captured clips caught her slurring her words during the Parton cover, as well as making up her own lyrics to the classic song.
“I don’t know the lyrics to these things in this f–king town,” King sang. “Don’t tell Dolly ’cause it’s her birthday.
“Everyone’s like, ‘Holy s–t, we bought tickets to this s–t.’ I’m not even going to lie,” she said while putting her hands in her pockets. “Holy s–t. I’m not even going to f–king lie. Y’all bought tickets for this s–t?”
The “America’s Sweetheart” singer then told the unimpressed crowd that they “ain’t gettin’ your money back.”
“I’ll tell you one thing more. Hi, my name is Elle King and I’m f–king hammered,” she added.
The singer has yet to address the incident, but she mysteriously postponed her upcoming concerts for later this year.
King previously battled substance abuse following her divorce from Andrew Ferguson in 2017.
“I was partying so hard to numb emotions that I couldn’t handle at the time,” she told People magazine in 2018. “I realized it was just prolonging the inevitable of dealing with them. And what you have to do, unfortunately, is just feel them, and that sucks.”
She continued: “I thought that by doing drugs it would buy me time to feeling better. And when that wasn’t working, I just realized I was in this other cycle, and that I was creating it myself. And I realized I needed to cut all the darkness out of my life.”
In 2022, King, who has a son, Lucky, 2, with fiancé Dan Tooker, told the San Diego Union Tribune that she had better control over her drinking.
“The music I made stone cold sober and organically has been some of my favorite music I’ve ever created. It doesn’t mean I’m not proud of the music I made when I wasn’t completely sober, but do I want to go back in time to who I was and give her a hug? Yeah, I do,” she told the outlet at the time. “Everything is about moving forward. But at the same time, I really like to drink and sing. I don’t want to get as drunk as I used to.”
King added: “My band did tell me when I was sober and eight months pregnant: ‘Elle, we’ve never seen you sing so good.’”
