At the Grand Ole Opry event in January, while performing Dolly’s 2001 hit “Marry Me”, King appeared to forget the words and began swearing onstage.
“Holy s–t. I swear if any of you guys tell Dolly,” she said at the show, which Parton herself did not attend. “I’m not even gonna f–king lie. Y’all bought tickets for this s–t? You ain’t getting your money back.”
She then added, “I’ll tell you one thing more. Hi, my name is Elle King. I’m f–king hammered.”
King told People the incident occurred while she was experiencing a “high level of pain” in her life, echoing comments she made in May.
“I had been going through something very heavy and traumatic in my life at the time,” she had said on Chelsea 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.”
She continued, “I got the curtain dropped on me and I was totally disassociated, and I just cut to the dressing room—me on the floor just sobbing, like, ‘What have I done?'”
