Dolly Parton Celebrates Reba McEntire’s Birthday With Throwback Photo and Sweet Message

Reba McEntire turned 66 on March 28, and her friend Dolly Parton celebrated with a throwback post of the two on Instagram. Parton shared a snapshot of a personalized photo she received from McEntire, which features a note from her fellow country star.

“Dolly! You’ll always be my hero!” the message read. “Love you, Reba.” Parton captioned her post, “A true musician. A true friend. Happy birthday, @reba.” McEntire shared the post on her own Instagram Story with a heart around it and the caption, “Love @dollyparton!!!” Along with Parton, McEntire received a number of other birthday wishes from her famous friends, including her Reba co-star Melissa Peterman, who posted a video montage of photos of McEntire set to The Golden Girls’ theme song, “Thank You for Being a Friend.”

“Happy Birthday @reba I just want to tell you,” her caption began, “that if you threw a party and invited everyone you knew, you would see the biggest gift might not be from me, bigger doesn’t always mean better, It might be medium sized or small (if it’s a necklace or something) BUT the card attached WOULD say Thank You For Being A Friend…….and then I would sign it Melissa Peterman so you would know it’s from me….and not Brett or Marne or someone else at the party…I mean, it’s a huge party. You invited everyone you knew.”

In September, Parton joined McEntire on her podcast, Living & Learning, which Peterman co-hosts, and McEntire told her longtime friend how much she looked up to her before she became a country superstar herself. “I wore it out,” McEntire told Parton of the latter’s 1969 album My Blue Ridge Mountain Boy. “Your songwriting, it is just so heartfelt, and it pierced my heart on every song. Those songs, I can still remember the words to ’em when I can’t remember the words to a song I have out as a single nowadays.”

Also during the episode, Parton named some of her favorite “Dollyisms” over the years, and McEntire told Southern Living that Parton is “so witty and so funny, and so smart and so giving, that when you do get a chance to sit down and talk to Dolly, that’s all you do.”

“You want to let her do all the talking,” she continued. “So, she got to rattling off these one-liners that she does. Like ‘never ignore your roots, your home, or your hair.’ And another one that I love, ‘a loose tongue can lead to broken teeth.’”