Dolly Parton shares hilarious reason she turned down tea with Kate Middleton

‘I thought it was very sweet and nice of her to invite me,’ country singer says

Dolly Parton has revealed the hilarious reason she turned down an invitation for tea with Kate Middleton, the Princess of Wales.

The “Jolene” singer explained on BBC Radio 2 that she received the invitation when she was in London for work. While expressing her love for the city, Parton told host Claudia Winkleman: “This time, Lordy, I even got invited to have tea with Kate but I couldn’t even go.”

“I thought it was very sweet and nice of her to invite me and one of these days I’m going to get to do that – that would be great,” she added. The country icon then joked that she declined Kate’s invite because “she wasn’t going to promote [her] rock album”.

Parton noted that although she does love the city, she rarely has the time to play tourist while she’s in town. “I love the people, the feel of London. I don’t unfortunately [get time to sightsee]. I have in the past, me and my band, in a tour bus when we have it planned,” she said.

The country singer says she doesn’t plan on hanging up the microphone anytime soon, saying that she would rather “drop dead” in the middle of a song than stop performing for good. She told Ken Bruce on Greatest Hits Radio, “I would never retire. I would hopefully drop dead in the middle of a song on stage someday - and hopefully one I’ve written - but that’s how I hope to go.”

She added, “I don’t have much of a choice in that but in the meantime, I’m going to make hay while the sun shines.”

Although she does plan on continuing for as long as she can, the singer-songwriter admitted that she had scaled back her work schedule. “I’m not touring anymore but I will continue to do special shows here and there now and then like a long weekend or festival shows,” she said. “But as far as touring I think those days are pretty much behind me... you have to stay gone so long on a tour to make it productive and prosperous and that’s a lot of time at my age - I ain’t got no years to waste.”

The last thing Parton said she wants to do is to live out her days on the road. Instead, she said she wants to direct her energy toward passion projects that include acting and producing.

“I want to have my own story called The Life of Many Colours where I have a whole TV series of my life,” she revealed. “Stuff that people haven’t seen or heard about me and where I come from and how I got to be how and who I am. The bad, the good and the ugly!”

Parton also said she’d be interested in hosting more TV shows and developing not only her own line of wigs but makeup and clothing lines as well. She explained, “Once you get to a certain place in your career you get a lot of offers and some of them are just really hard to turn down.”

The BBC Radio 2 interview comes on the heels of Parton’s recent announcement that this November she’ll release a new album, Rockstar. What will be her 49th studio album to date will feature 30 tracks, including nine original songs and 21 classic rock covers with famous friends like Elton John, Sting, and Pink among others.