Tina Knowles denied clapping back at Dolly Parton over the legendary singer’s opinion on the Country Music Awards snubbing Beyoncé. Knowles claimed an Instagram comment attributed to her was fake after it went viral on Thursday (September 19).
“This is fake not from me!” Knowles declared.
Blogs spread a message supposedly written by Knowles in response to Parton’s September 17 interview with Variety. Parton defended the CMAs for not nominating Beyoncé for any awards.
“Oh Ms. Dolly, we love you, but Bey did spend her WHOLE life workin’ hard, since she was 9!” Knowles was claimed to have written. “She got country roots too. She’s mastered her craft and broken records in EVERY genre. So sayin’ she didn’t ‘spend her life’ in country music dismisses all that work she put in. Bey don’t need to stay in one lane to get respect – her talent and work ethic speak for themselves! She’s been puttin’ in the work, and nobody else gets asked to ‘spend their life’ in one place to be recognized! #beencountry.”
Parton praised Beyoncé in the Variety interview. Before the release of Cowboy Carter, Parton was arguably the biggest country star to co-sign Beyoncé’s pivot to the genre.
“There’s so many wonderful country artists that, I guess probably the country music field, they probably thought, well, we can’t really leave out some of the ones that spend their whole life doing that,” Parton told Variety. “But I didn’t even realize [Beyoncé wasn’t nominated] until somebody asked me that question. But it was a wonderful album. She can be very, very proud of, and I think everybody in country music welcomed her and thought that, that was good. So I don’t think it was a matter of shutting out, like doing that on purpose. I think it was just more of what the country charts and the country artists were doing, that do that all the time, not just a specialty album.”
Beyoncé covered Parton’s classic song “Jolene” on Cowboy Carter. Parton said she’s open to performing a “Jolene” duet with Beyoncé.