Brandi Carlile on Dolly Parton: ‘She Took a Risk and Accepted Me for Being Gay’

Brandi Carlile says Dolly Parton once prayed over her and she’s “never been the same since.” Carlile remembered the Country Music Hall of Fame member, who died Tuesday at 80 after a brief battle with cancer, in a social media post.

“Before I met her, I loved her because she took a risk and accepted me (and all of us) for being gay in a time where she didn’t need to say anything,” Carlile wrote on Instagram. “And she has been asked to comment and speak on MANY things over the years… choosing only to speak on that which brings love and mercy to real people, and shutting down any line of questioning that won’t. She never wavered on accepting anyone for who they were and who they were meant to be.”

Carlile shared the stage with Parton, and her colleagues in the Highwomen, at the 2019 Newport Folk Festival. One of the highlights of the set was Carlile’s dramatic performance of “I Will Always Love You” with Parton.

But it was watching the “Jolene” singer’s set at Glastonbury a few years earlier, in 2014, that stayed with Carlile.

“I’m married to an agnostic Londoner, and I can’t help but laugh out loud when I think of the raptured audience at Glastonbury in the palm of Dolly’s hands, as she ended her once in a lifetime set by shouting ‘can I get an amen?!’” she wrote. “The sound of two hundred thousand immediate British ‘AMENS’ is something that causes me to burst into American hysterics at least once a week!”