Watch Dolly Parton and Brandi Carlile Perform ‘I Will Always Love You’

Prepare yourself, because the sheer amount of gay energy in this next sentence might be too much to handle: during a recent concert, gay icon Dolly Parton and queer Americana songstress Brandi Carlile covered Parton's 1974 song "I Will Always Love You."

For the Newport Folk Festival, Carlile had curated a lineup of female musicians including Maggie Rogers, Sheryl Crow, Linda Perry, and Parton, who Carlile brought out as a surprise guest during her set. "It was just a little song that I felt from my heart," Parton told the audience as she introduced the beloved song, which she famously wrote in the same day as "Jolene." The song was popularized after Whitney Houston covered it for The Bodyguard's soundtrack. "I'm talking my head off, you got anything to say?" Parton asked, and Carlile replied, "Just that I love you."

"It really hit me somewhere in the middle of the night last night, what had happened, before I stopped dwelling on the imperfections and things that no one in the audience knows or cares about that are happening onstage," Carlile told Billboard following the performance. "I was just really overwhelmed, and thinking it was a gift that was bestowed upon me this year. I got to receive that gift. I didn't feel like it was so much something I did as something I got to have. We all got to have that."

"As a gay icon and probably the first country western singer to ever acknowledge and affirm LGBTQ people in a literary sense," Carlile said of Parton. Out was unable to verify this as factually true, but it is true, spiritually. "She impacted me, hugely, when I read her book when I was 15." She added that their duet "was a big, full-circle moment for me, and I almost lost it when she pulled me close in that moment."

Parton and Carlile closed the set with help from Rogers, Perry, and Crow, who joined them for "9 to 5."

I smell another "Old Town Road" remix...

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