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Farewells are bitter, but they don’t have to be all final. At least not from the Dolly Parton’s point of view. In an exclusive video for Rolling Stone the country icon shared an emotional farewell message to Ozzy OsbournE who played his last concert last weekend as part of Black Sabbath’s farewell tour “Back to the Beginning”. Parton’s video message was shown during the breaks between the appearances on screens in Villa Park in Birmingham, England.
Dolly Parton in the metal world
“I know that you are at home. And what a wonderful place this is, isn’t it? Should we really say goodbye to you now? Well, I don’t think that will happen,” said Parton. “How would it be if we just say: Good luck, God bless you, and at some point we see each other again. At least – I love you, I always loved you. And we’ll miss you on stage, but do you know what? I would not be surprised if you reappear somewhere else – and I will be there.”
A heavy metal concert is not an unlikely place for Parton. Last month, the singer appeared on Mötley Crües’s reinterpretation of “Home Sweet Home” as a duet-part of her upcoming single collection “From the Beginning”, which will be released in September.
“Back to the starting”, a benefit concert, united the original Black Sabbath line-up: Ozzy Osbourne, guitarist Tony Iommi, bassist Geezer butler and drummer Bill Ward. At the beginning of this year, Iommi told the Guardian: “I was the one who said: ‘I don’t know if we should do it’ because we have already done a farewell tour and I did not want to slide into this rail, like all the other bands that say it was the last tour, and then I was convinced because we were doing it for a certain reason.”
Farewell to obstacles
Osbourne was faced with numerous health problems in the run -up to his grand finale. “You wake up the next morning and find that something else is wrong again,” the musician told the Guardian. “You start thinking that it will never end. Sharon saw that I was in Doom Town, and she said to me: ‘I have an idea.’ It was something that gave me a reason to get up in the morning.
Parton’s studio album “Rockstar” from 2023 presented the country queen in a duet with artists like Rob Halford by Judas Priest, Steven Tyler from Aerosmith as well as Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr.