Dolly Parton may have already forgiven and forgotten, but Elle King is finally ready to address what happened during her much-skewered Dolly tribute performance at the Grand Ole Opry earlier this year. The January incident saw the singer criticized for appearing visibly drunk during what was supposed to be a celebratory birthday show for the country star’s 78th birthday, drawing the ire of Dolly stans and at least one of Dolly’s sisters. Though King previously thanked fans for giving her grace and allowing her “human” to show back in March, the singer sat down with Chelsea Handler Wednesday to explain exactly what happened in the lead-up to her onstage struggles.
“I had been going through something very heavy and traumatic in my life at the time,” King admitted during an episode of Handler’s iHeartRadio podcast, Dear Chelsea. “That day was a really big day, dealing with what I was going through and am still going through, and I suffer from severe PTSD.”
Without disclosing the cause of her PTSD, the 34-year-old went on to detail how she “hadn’t eaten” or “slept in days” ahead of the tribute, describing her general mental state during that period as “a shell of myself.” Due to a snowstorm that day, the headliner pulled out of the show three hours before curtains-up, and King was slotted in as the backup headliner at the last minute. Though she performed without issues earlier in the evening, King said she “took one shot too many” just before her second appearance, during which she forgot the words to Dolly’s 2001 song “Marry Me.”
“I’m just not there in my body. I’m not there. I don’t even remember what I said,” King continued. “I got the curtain dropped on me, and I totally disassociated, and I just cut to the dressing room: me on the floor just sobbing, like, ‘What have I done?’” It wasn’t until then, she recalled, that she realized she was “fucking hammered.”
But with a private Dolly apology in her pocket and a swatch of successful performances since then (including this year’s Stagecoach Festival), King is well on her way to recovery and beyond. To close this chapter once and for all, I’ll let Dolly have the last words: “Forgiveness, friends, forget it.”
