How Dolly Parton Dealt With a Bomb Threat Ahead of an Important Concert

In 1983, Dolly Parton nervously prepared for a concert special in England. She was incredibly concerned ahead of the show as she wasn’t sure how the audience would react to her. Her audience’s perception of her outfit became the least of her worries, though. Just before she was meant to start the show, she heard news of a bomb threat to the theater. Here’s how Parton reacted.

Dolly Parton learned of a bomb threat shortly before a concert

Parton filmed a 1983 HBO special at the Old Dominion Theater in London. She spent time before the concert fretting about her audience. She wasn’t sure how they would react to “the big, overblown, oversequined cartoon of a woman who was about to stand before them,” (per Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business). 

As she worried about getting heckled, she received even more troubling news. Scotland Yard received a bomb threat, so everyone had to leave the theater.

“The next thing that happened looked as if it would kill the entire project,” she wrote. “A bomb threat was phoned in to Scotland Yard. Well, everybody was forced to evacuate the building, including me and my entourage and the television crew.”

Parton waited outside, certain she wouldn’t be able to move forward with the special.

“Sandy and I sat in a tea shop across the street and wondered, ‘What the hell have we done this time?’” she wrote. “But before long, a polite English policeman came to announce, ‘The unpleasantness is over, and you may return to the theater.’”

Dolly Parton was highly moved by her audience’s reaction

Though she knew it was safe to return to the theater, Parton wasn’t sure her audience would risk sitting through the show. It came as an incredibly welcome surprise, then, when she realized every seat was full.

“We went back in, fully expecting to be the only ones there. To our delight and surprise, the entire audience had returned,” she wrote. “They had all waited outside until the bomb squad and its dogs had done their search and then filed back in as if nothing had happened.”

She was so moved that she could hardly get through the first song.

“When the show finally began, I was barely able to sing because of the lump in my throat,” she wrote. “These people didn’t just accept me and my songs, they embraced both of us with warm, open hearts.”

She received a number of threats in her career

Years before this, Parton received a series of frightening death threats. As she prepared to perform a 1976 concert in West Virginia, the radio station sponsoring the show received a call threatening Parton’s life. 

“We had our stuff backstage, unpacked and ready to go,” her former guitarist Tom Rutledge said in the book Dolly by Alanna Nash. “I was next door eating, and word came down that we weren’t going to play. We packed all our stuff up and put it in the bus and took off. Dolly was real upset. She couldn’t go on stage thinking that someone would actually try that and maybe shoot one of us or something. It just really freaked her out.”

The following day, Parton received a similar threat ahead of a show in Louisville. This time, she played the show, but with a heavy police presence.

“It was kinda scary,” Rutledge said. “Most of those things are just pranks, but you don’t really know.”