Dolly Parton met Miley Cyrus the day she was born. It was her father Billy Ray’s idea—he opened for Dolly in the early 90s and asked her to be his daughter’s honorary godmother. From then on came three decades of public affection, shared jokes, and a relationship Miley always described as something bigger than music.
What neither of them knew was that this bond had much older roots. In September 2024, during an interview with Access Hollywood, Ancestry.com showed Dolly something that left her speechless: she and Miley share a common ancestor, John Brickey, born in 1740 in Virginia and who died in 1806 in Blount County, Tennessee, the same land where they both grew up.
Brickey is Dolly’s sixth-great-grandfather and Miley’s seventh-great-grandfather. That officially makes them seventh cousins once removed. Thirty years of being godmother and goddaughter ended up confirming something that had already been written in their blood for more than two centuries.
