A “bonfire” at Dolly’s! Ashley McBryde revealed during her Wednesday (March 1) appearance on The Jennifer Hudson Show that she once accidentally set a fire while house-sitting for Dolly Parton.
The “Bonfire at Tina’s” singer shared that when she was younger, she and Parton’s niece were in charge of looking after the country icon’s home while construction workers were remodeling its lake house, and she accidentally set fire to a microwave while trying to heat up Bagel Bites.
“We set the microwave on fire on accident in a newly wallpapered room. Bagel Bites are delicious … but you have to be careful. You don’t want to be that person! Like, ‘Oh you know that girl set Dolly’s house on fire.’ “I grabbed [the microwave], it was fully on fire, I grabbed it and took it outside,” McBryde told Hudson, who wouldn’t help but laugh.
Parton, however, wasn’t upset with McBryde over the incident. “Dolly is such a sweet person. When she found out about it, she gave me the microwave,” the 39-year-old shared. “She gave me the microwave because I just moved to town. I was broke, I didn’t have a microwave. It smelled like burnt bowling shoes. I used it for like a year and a half.”
McBryde previously opened up about the incident in an interview with Audacy’s Rob + Holly at the Faster Horses Festival. As it turns out, Parton’s niece was the one who put the Bagel Bites in the microwave that cause it to catch fire, not her.
“I do take the blame for [the fire] because I’m the one who removed the on-fire microwave out of the house, but it was honestly her niece,” she shared. “She stuck a whole box of Bagel Bites in there — like, in the box and then ‘beep,’ there it goes in a freshly wallpapered room.”
Watch McBryde talk about the incident above.