Brandi Carlile says Dolly Parton 'took a risk' accepting gay artists like her

This story originally appeared on Them.

In a heartfelt tribute to the late Dolly Parton, who died today at age 80, singer-songwriter Brandi Carlile said that she had “felt her leaving all week” and had been “asking folks to pray every day,” proceeding to share a series of touching thoughts on faith and LGBTQ+ inclusion.

“She took my face in her hands and prayed over me once,” Carlile, who collaborated with Parton on her final solo studio album Rockstar, recalled in an Instagram post. “I’ve never been the same since. Her prayers were maybe more powerful than mine or anyone else’s because that prayer has had a very long rainbow-colored halo and I hope it lasts me my whole life.”

Carlile added that because her wife and manager, Catherine Carlile, is an “agnostic Londoner”, she often thinks about Parton’s legendary 2014 Glastonbury set, which culminated in the country music icon asking, “Can I get an amen?”

“The sound of two hundred thousand immediate British ‘AMENS’ is something that causes me to burst into American hysterics at least once a week!” Carlile wrote, adding, “I loved Dolly with all my heart.”

Carlile also praised Parton’s long history of LGBTQ+ allyship, thanking the late icon for sticking up for openly gay artists in country music and beyond. “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.”

The multi-Grammy-winning artist reserved special praise for Parton’s acumen in handling interviewers who often asked her to weigh in on political issues through the lens of party politics, saying that she chose “only to speak on that which brings love and mercy to real people” while “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.”

For example, when asked about anti-transgender legislation in her home state of Tennessee in 2023, Parton issued a quintessentially human response that avoided commenting on the specifics of the bill, sharing that her own inner circle included trans people, lesbians, and all types of people. “They cannot help that any more than I can help being Dolly Parton, you know, the way people know me,” she said. “If there’s something to be judged, that is God’s business. But we are all God’s children and how we are is who we are.”

Carlile would go on to meet Parton in 2016, according to a Facebook post, but it was their 2019 duet of “I Will Always Love You” at the Newport Folk Festival that marked the pair’s most memorable link-up. Carlile shared a full video of the performance at the end of her tribute, featuring a moving moment in which Parton wraps her arm around Carlile onstage near the beginning of the number.

“As a gay icon and probably the first country western singer to ever acknowledge and affirm LGBTQ people in a literary sense, she impacted me, hugely, when I read her book when I was 15,” Carlile told Billboard at the time. “That was a big, full-circle moment for me, and I almost lost it when she pulled me close in that moment.”

Carlile’s tribute ended with a nod to some of Parton’s greatest assets — namely, her kindness and humor. “And yet I’m nobody and everyone all at once,” she wrote. “Just a heartbroken Dolly fan at the end of the day with a head full of memories, prayers, and songs left behind by a big-breasted angel with a twinkle in her eye and the whole world in her hands.”

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