Tale as old as time, true as it can be. Like countless parents every spring, Jelly Roll got emotional as he sent his daughter, Bailee Ann, off to her very first prom, with the teenager looking gorgeous in a yellow dress mirroring Disney’s Princess Belle from Beauty and the Beast.
In a sweet clip set to Cody Johnson’s nostalgia-ridden track “Dirt Cheap” that Bailee posted to TikTok over the weekend, the “Son of a Sinner” singer looks choked up as he walks toward the camera with a bouquet of roses. It then cuts to Jelly and his firstborn standing side by side as the musician flashes a huge smile before spinning Bailee around.
“my built in best friend,” Bailee wrote of her dad in the caption.
Jelly’s wife, podcaster Bunnie XO, also shared footage from the day, starting with Bailee’s getting-ready process. “You’re going to look like a little princess tonight!” Bunnie gushes as her stepdaughter — over whom she shares full custody with the country star — gets her hair done. “It’s your first prom, I’m so excited, oh my god.”
“I call her the Prom Pimp,” Jelly jokes right after. “That’s what I’m calling her: the Prom Pimp.”
Later, as Bailee and her friends take photos in their fancy outfits, Bunnie films her famous husband hugging a family friend with tears in his eyes. “Are you motherf–kers crying? You’re supposed to be the men of the family!” the Dumb Blonde host jokes as Jelly laughs. “What is happening?”
Bailee’s prom comes just a couple of weeks ahead of Jelly’s April 29 kickoff show in Salt Lake City with Post Malone on the Big Ass Stadium Tour. The trek follows the October release of the “Need a Favor” artist’s album, Beautifully Broken, which debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200.
But even with everything going on career-wise, Jelly — who is also Dad to a son named Noah — and Bunnie are currently in the process of trying to expand their family through IVF. The latter has been open about her journey with the treatments in recent months, telling listeners on a March podcast episode, “It’s very lonely … It’s just you and these hormones and the waiting and the egg retrieval. And like, you’re the only person who can go through that, you know? So it’s a lot to bear.”
Jelly has also been open about how far he’s come as a parent to Bailee, telling Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes and Will Arnett on the trio’s Smartless podcast in March that he had to fight for his chance to have a relationship with the now-teenager as he was incarcerated on drug charges at the time of her birth. “Her mother, at the time … rightfully so [because I was] a f–king criminal, wouldn’t let me see her,” the “Save Me” musician recalled.
“So I had to go to court,” he added at the time. “I had to get supervised visits through the courtroom … I just had to keep going to the court every six months and going, ‘Look, I’m continuing to prove I’m changing.’ Music, being famous, wasn’t even a thought then. I just wanted to be a good dad.”
Watch Jelly and Bunnie see Bailee off to her first prom below.
