Miley Cyrus had a story she needed to tell before she could sing the song. Performing at the Hollywood Bowl on Friday night, Cyrus paused her concert to remember her godmother, Dolly Parton, and the one time she got to sit in that same amphitheater as a fan and simply watch Parton perform.
As Cyrus told it, she went to that long-ago Parton show during her Hannah Montana years hoping to go unnoticed, and she and Parton had agreed she would just watch quietly from her seat. Parton had other ideas: she opened her own show with “The Best of Both Worlds,” the Hannah Montana theme, and then announced her anyway. “I don’t know if y’all know this, but my goddaughter is Hannah Montana, and she’s actually here tonight, but she’s sitting out in her seat,” Cyrus recalled Parton announcing to the crowd, “like a proud aunt,” before adding that Cyrus had not wanted anyone to bug her and had just wanted to watch the show. The announcement, Cyrus joked, “defeated the entire purpose of the conversation that we had just had, because absolutely no one was aware that I was at the concert until she drew an obnoxious amount of attention to it.” Then her tone turned. “But like so many things Dolly did, I didn’t understand at the time,” she said.
The Hollywood Reporter notes Cyrus told the Bowl crowd she could feel Parton’s presence with her throughout the performance. “Sitting here with you all right now, feeling her all around me, knowing that she’s right here beside me, every day, more than she could be when she was here; I feel her more now than ever,” she said. “Knowing that I get to share this story with you all, it makes that night very worth it. This memory is gold to me. Me and Dolly, we are eternal. Nothing in this life could ever tear us apart, and I’m gonna see her again.” Through tears, she added simply that she misses her.
She then introduced the song that ties them together. “Some of the greatest music that we have today was written, produced, performed by my Aunt Dolly, and this is one of those songs,” she said, before singing “Jolene,” Parton’s signature 1973 hit, which Cyrus has been covering for years and performed alongside Parton herself.
The tribute came during Cyrus’s own rare concert appearance, a show Variety reports was built largely around live debuts from her new album Bass Persuades. Later in the same show, Entertainment Now reports, Cyrus sang her own “Wrecking Ball” while holding a framed photograph of Parton. Parton died on August 25 at 80, after a brief battle with cancer, and Cyrus marked her passing on Instagram at the time, writing, “The feeling of losing my Aunt Dolly is beyond what feels right to share.” On Friday, in the venue where Parton once pointed her out to a crowd, she shared it anyway, in the form of a memory and a song.
Two nights later, Cyrus used her second Hollywood Bowl show on Sunday night to answer the criticism of Friday’s comeback directly. She told the crowd that singing does not come as naturally as it once did, and that before “Orbit” she had nearly decided not to come on stage at all. “I already told myself I wasn’t going to come on stage, I was going to run away,” she said, in remarks reported by Variety. “But never would I leave you all sitting in these seats, unfulfilled from a show. One thing I will not stand is any question about where my heart is when I’m on the stage. I am fully present.”