During an appearance on NBC’s Today on Monday, Dolly Parton said she was offered the Presidential Medal of Freedom two different times by former president Trump. The country music icon said she had to decline.
“I got offered the Freedom award from the Trump Administration. I couldn’t accept it because my husband was ill and then they asked me again about it and I wouldn’t travel because of the Covid,” she said, in reply to a question about how former president Obama, regretting that he never presented Parton with the award during his two terms in office, was going to suggest the honor to President Biden.
But Parton says she’s not certain she’d accept the Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor, at all.
“Now I feel like if I take it I’ll be doing politics, so I’m not sure,” she said. “I don’t work for those awards, but I’m not sure that I even deserve it. But that’s a nice compliment for people to think that I might deserve it.”
Elsewhere, Parton’s iconic anthem of empowerment “9 to 5” is set to make an appearance in an upcoming Super Bowl ad for the create-your-own-website company SquareSpace. Retitled and rerecorded as “5 to 9,” the new lyrics reference after-hours side jobs.
“It’s hustlin’ time/only way to make a livin’/gonna change your life/do somethin’ that gives it meanin’” Parton sings over a montage of dancing office-workers. (The country singer appears on the cover of a magazine in the clip.)
“Well, I work 365 [days a year]. I’m always working 5 to 9, 9 to 5. I work all hours of the night and day,” Parton told the AP. “Whatever you need to do, you gotta get it done, however many hours it takes.”