Whether you’re a die-hard country music fan or not, chances are you’re familiar with the glittering persona and powerhouse voice of Dolly Parton, from her towering blonde wigs and rhinestone outfits down to her signature hourglass silhouette.
Dolly Rebecca Parton, born in 1946, was always the life of the party — the kind of party that never runs out of stories or songs.
Raised in the rustic hollers of East Tennessee, young Dolly Parton was one of twelve siblings in a family that had more love than money. A self-proclaimed “dirt poor” child, Parton’s humble beginnings inspired her unique blend of music and storytelling. It’s a quality that’s kept her career thriving for more than six decades.
Young Dolly Parton kicked off her career in the mid-60s, early on working alongside country music singer Porter Wagoner on his television program. The exposure Parton gained on “The Porter Wagoner Show” was a springboard to national recognition, and launched a partnership that resulted in a series of hit duets.
However, as Parton’s solo career began to gain momentum, she made the hard decision to branch out on her own, sparking her poignant song, “I Will Always Love You.”
Initially written as a farewell to Wagoner, the song became a sensation, cementing her place in the country music pantheon, and crossing over to mainstream pop success when it was covered by Whitney Houston in 1992.
Parton’s influence didn’t stop at music. Her larger-than-life personality naturally transitioned into acting. Films like 9 to 5 and Steel Magnolias earned her recognition on the silver screen. Yet, she never strayed far from her musical roots, but used film as another medium to share her songs.
Dolly Parton’s philanthropy is as well-known as her music. From literacy programs to medical research funding, Parton’s generosity is far-reaching. Her Imagination Library project, founded in 1995, has provided over 100 million free books to children across the globe, promoting literacy and a love for reading.
Looking back, Parton’s music career has been nothing short of extraordinary. From her early days on “The Porter Wagoner Show” to becoming a multi-platinum selling artist, her talent has always been undeniable.
Parton kept her trademark look for the rest of her life, still fond of her own line, “It’s a good thing I was born a girl, otherwise, I’d be a drag queen.” She died August 25, 2026, in Nashville at age 80, following a brief battle with cancer, closing out a six-decade career in music, film and philanthropy.
Below, meet young Dolly Parton at age 24, and see how her career grew & grew — plus see lots of photos of her through the years.
Miss Dolly Parton: Blonde bombshell of the Great Smokies (1970)
Article by Sak Hurst, The Tennessean (Memphis, TN) September 27, 1970
My voice was real different — not that it’s good, because a lot of people just cannot STAND to hear me sing. Anybody with a real different voice, a lot of people don’t like to hear sing, but people who do like them usually like them especially well. — Dolly Parton
On the wall behind the desk at which her uncle sat, her picture — a large and engaging color photograph framed in gold — beamed down on all who might enter Owepar Music.
Her hair hung in perfect golden ringlets beside her face, and she was smiling in the wacky way she does when people tell her she is beautiful, grinning as if it is maybe the most hugely funny lie she has heard all week.
“Dolly’ll be in in just a minute,” the uncle, Louie Owens, said rather nervously to the prospective interviewer. “She’s talkin’ to somebody about a song, and won’t be but a second.”
On the wall opposite the picture, facing the desk at which Louie Owens fidgeted, hung several framed Broadcast Music Inc. award citations to Owepar for songs Dolly had written or co-written. Over there also hung the latest recording popularity charts distributed by Billboard and Record World.
“She’s doin’ pretty good right now,” her uncle said. “‘Muleskinner Blues’ is No. 1 in Record World and No. 3 in Billboard. And ‘Daddy Was An Old-Time Preacher Man’ is No. 8 in Billboard.”
In the minute or so he had forecast, his niece walked into her office in a glittering black jumpsuit dotted with regularly-spaced, diamond-shaped, white patterns the size of once-folded dollar bills. The blonde hair hung long today, not done up high in ringlets, and she extended her hand in the frank, happy shake folks use back home in the hills.
“Hi, I’m proud to meet you.” She sat down in the chair, crossed her legs and then clasped her hands across her waist to wait for the first question.
Not long after it came, however, she kicked off the gold shoes and pulled her feet up into the chair with her, holding her knees in both arms. By that time, she was well into remembering who Dolly Rebecca Parton used to be.
Young Dolly Parton: The bombshell
Dolly Parton, who at her present age of 24 years is the blonde bombshell of the Porter Wagoner Show, was born the fourth of a dozen children of a farmer-turned-construction worker in Sevier County, Tennessee.
“Mama and Daddy were married pretty early in life — she was 15 and he was 17,” she said. She sighed and then smiled that wacky smile. “So they done… pretty well.”
Her first memories seem to be of a farm of several hundred acres “‘way back in the Smoky Mountains at a place that was called Webb’s Mountain then.” The family moved there when she was three and stayed — raising crops and animals “mainly just for our own survival, rather than to sell” — for about five years.
“I graduated from Sevier County High School in 1964, but up until then, I went to elementary school just wherever we would move to, because we used to move quite a bit after we left the big farm,” she recalled.
After having moved around the county for a couple of years, the Partons finally settled in tiny Caton’s Chapel community when Dolly was around 10. Her parents still live there today.
Religion and fun
At Webb’s Mountain and Caton’s Chapel and the other small communities in which Dolly grew up, religion was both a solemn duty and a looked-forward-to recreation.
Particularly was this true of the Partons. Dolly Parton’s grandfather was a minister, the Rev. Mr. Owens, an old-time preacher man.
In the words one of his daughters and one of his granddaughters would use someday, the Rev. Mr. Owens “preached hell so hot that you could feel the heat.” In the song about him which currently is among the top ten country songs in the nation, Dolly Parton and Mrs Dorothy Hope tried to convey the spirit of the way it was in that fundamentalist church in the hills.
“There’s a verse in the song where it says, ‘Sister Leona would get up to testify,'” Miss Dolly said, “and I actually did have an Aunt Leona and she actually would get up in the service to testify.
“I was brought up in the Church of God, which is the church where they shout and sing and everything, which I love,” she continued in a more subdued way. “I always loved to sing in church. When you get to singing those old gospel songs and get that good spiritual feeling — well, there’s just nothing else like it.”
Before long, however, Dolly Parton was singing something besides hymns, and she was singing so well that one of her mother’s brothers, Bill Owens, decided to get her on the radio in Knoxville.
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By the time she was in high school, she was writing some of the songs she sang, and some were uncommonly good for a girl her age. Growing up in small farm communities in the mountains, where the work was hard and time often passed slowly, Dolly Parton became fascinated with the transmigration that was possible with a guitar, a piece of paper and a stub of pencil.
“When I’m writing,” she said curled up in that easy chair in her Music Row office, “I can be anywhere and any thing that I want to be. If I’m writing about a dog or a cat — whatever I’m writing about, I am that thing. And I’m the kind of person that even the ugliest duckling is pretty to me, some way or another.”
One wonders what her classmates at Sevier County High thought of her then as they saw her on the Knoxville television station, singing on a program sponsored by grocery king Cas Walker.
‘Live and in-person’
Last spring, as “live and in-person” recordings at such places as Carnegie Hall became the vogue for country singers, Miss Dolly gathered up an RCA engineering crew, stage boss Porter Wagoner and Wagoner’s Wagon Masters. She took them with her one evening to do her own “live” album. But rather than Carnegie Hall, she took them to Sevier County High School.
The day before the performance that evening — a day called “Dolly Parton Day” in Sevierville — the blonde bombshell announced she was donating her part of the proceeds of that night’s show to set up a scholarship fund for deserving students at the high school. She promised to return for benefit shows whenever they were needed to maintain the fund.
Dolly Parton Day, 1970, was a roaring success. It must have made the honoree recall a certain Saturday morning six years before, the morning following her graduation night, when a less-assured Dolly Rebecca — accompanied only by her suitcase — took a long look at Sevierville from a different vantage point. It was from the high window of a Greyhound bus getting into gear for the run to Nashville.
Memorable walk
The uncle who had gotten her on the Cas Walker Show in Knoxville, Bill Owens, had moved to Nashville with his wife and young son three weeks before his niece graduated from high school. “So I was to stay with them until I could get something going and find myself a place of my own,” Dolly remembers.
When she arrived at the Owens’ apartment in the State Fairgrounds area of South Nashville, Dolly Parton had some clothes to wash because she had left for Nashville in such a hurry. So, taking her dirty clothes in her arms, she walked to a nearby laundromat on her first afternoon in Nashville. It turned out to be memorable in more ways than one.
Her long yellow locks shook as she giggled, remembering it. “I got me a big RC Cola and while my clothes were washing I just went out walkin’ down the sidewalk to see Nashville,” she said.
“I was just walkin’ down the street and this boy came by in this white ’59 or ’60 Chevrolet. He went down first and he flirted and, of course, being fresh from the country, well, up where I come from everybody was friendly to everybody because everybody was friends, and I didn’t know that you just couldn’t do that anywhere.”
The young man in the Chevrolet shouted at her, and she smiled and waved. “‘Cause I was just so proud to be here, you know,” she said, laughing. “I guess kind of in the back of my mind I was maybe flirtin’ a little, too,” she admitted, “but mainly I was just bein’ friendly because I’d always been the kind of person who would speak back and smile.”
In a few minutes, the Chevrolet was passing her for the second time as she strolled along the street, and she was thinking perhaps she should not appear so friendly. The car slowed again and the young man hung his head out the window.
“Hey, you’re gonna get sunburned out walking around like that,” he yelled.
“I don’t reckon it’ll hurt anything,” Dolly replied.
He stopped the car and got out to talk. “Where you from?” he asked.
“I told him I was from Knoxville because I didn’t figure he’d know where Sevierville was,” she said. “He still kids me about saying I was from Knoxville. He says I said it kind of highfalutin’ or somethin,’ but I didn’t.”
He tried to get her to go out with him, but she would not at first. “I didn’t know him,” she said. “I didn’t know anything about him.”
She was to babysit with her uncle’s son while his wife worked her shift as a waitress at the Shoney’s Big Boy restaurant on Harding Road. She told her sudden suitor that he could come over to her uncle’s house the next afternoon, while she babysat.
“He came over and we sat out in the yard and talked,” she said. “But I still wouldn’t go on a date with him for several days. When I finally did, the first place he took me the first night we went out was to his parents’ house, and that made me feel a lot better about him.”
Almost exactly two years after she had met him on her first day in Nashville, Dolly Parton was married to Carl Dean [in 1966], now 28, a partner in his father’s small but busy asphalt paving company in Woodbine.
Hungry years
The two intervening years were busy ones for the little hill-country blonde. They were often also hungry ones, she recalls.
“I stayed about six months with Uncle Bill, and then I got me an apartment of my own,” she said. “I couldn’t afford a car or a telephone, and,” she laughed, “’bout the only time I ever ate was when I went out on a date, and I didn’t go out on that many dates.”
She stopped laughing pretty quickly and looked down at her hands in her lap. “Well, actually, that was about the way it was, even though I was trying to make a joke out of it,” she said. “Lots of times, my refrigerator was just about empty, except for mustard or turnip greens — things you always keep.”
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Her activities did not pay her very much, but she had gotten consistently busier as time went by. She began recording demonstration records for songwriters to pitch to successful recording stars.
She was on a “draw,” writing songs for Combine Music for a weekly salary. She began making her own recordings for Monument Records, where executive producer Fred Foster took a keen interest in her ability. He found her a song called “Dumb Blonde.”
“‘Dumb Blonde’ was written by Curly Putnam, who wrote ‘Green, Green Grass of Home’ and a lot of other great songs,” Dolly said. “Fred thought the song would be good for me because it was up-tempo, for one thing, and it didn’t really take a lot of singing. He figured it would make people forget about whether my voice was any good or not, and just listen to the song.”
Foster must have been correct. “Dumb Blonde” was her first really successful recording. She was working on Eddie Hill’s show on WLAC-TV — being paid out of Hill’s pocket rather than by the station because the Hill show was already over its budget.
“I was working and making a little money, but not very much considering all the things I was having to do with it, and trying to send a little money home when I could,” she said.
Unexpected call
One afternoon she received an unexpected telephone call from a country singer she had never met in her journeys up and down Music Row: Porter Wagoner, a slim Missourian who long has made fame and fortune selling country music fans patent medicine and heartbreak-and-honkytonk music.
Wagoner asked her if she could come by his office and talk business. Of course, she said she would be there as quickly as she could.
“I didn’t know Porter, except for watchin’ his TV show every week there at home with the family — which every country family that can possibly pick it up does,” she said. She supposed Wagoner wanted to see her about one of her songs.
“I had songs out all over town trying to get them recorded, and Porter and Norma Jean — the girl singer with his show — had a couple of them. Somebody at Combine had told me Norma Jean liked one of them especially well. I figured they were callin’ me over there to tell me they were taking one of the songs, or maybe wanted to get me to make some changes in one of them, or something.”
That was not what Wagoner wanted. He told her that Norma Jean was getting married and leaving the Wagoner show to move back to Oklahoma, and Dolly Parton was under consideration for the job.
That first afternoon
One recent night at WSM-TV, where he and Dolly and the Wagonmasters were videotaping two more of their weekly shows, Porter Wagoner grinned as he remembered that first afternoon Miss Dolly visited his office.
“You tell him about… many hymns?” he asked Dolly, nodding toward the reporter.
She blushed and shook her head. “No,” she said. “He asked the questions, and I just answered them.” Porter grinned wider.
“We were talking about how she would fit into the show, you know,” he began, “and I asked her if she would mind wearing fairly conservative clothes because of the family type of show we try to do. Well, she said that was fine with her, and then I asked her if she knew many hymns.
“Well, she thought a minute, and then she said, ‘Minnie Hemms? No, I don’t believe I know her.’ We’d been talking about dresses and she thought Minnie Hemms was a seamstress.”
The very embarrassed Miss Dolly brought a hand up to her face, hung her head and smiled with a red face. “Then I caught it,” she said, “and I laughed and then started telling him all the hymns I knew, trying to cover it up if I could. I didn’t want him to think I was ignorant — at least not the first time he ever saw me.”
‘Nobody’s Fool’
Miss Dolly is about as dumb as that dumb blonde she sings of — a young lady who, according to the lyrics, “ain’t nobody’s fool.”
She writes nearly all of her own recordings, many of Wagoner’s and most of their duets. Thus, it is much more than her beauty that makes Miss Dolly valuable to the Porter Wagoner Show, the longest-running and most successful of Nashville syndicated country music television shows.
After four years on that show, Miss Dolly is moving toward a place among the female superstars of the business — women like Loretta Lynn and Tammy Wynette. Her current recording of “Muleskinner Blues,” which is not unlikely to become a classic, was her first No. 1 song in the trade magazine charts. It is safe to bet there will be more.
Miss Dolly, meanwhile, wears her hair either incredibly high or incredibly long, and sometimes is seen in clothes that are at the very least gaudy — like a pink jumpsuit she wore on the Grand Ole Opry stage at last year’s Disc Jockey Convention. With high, gauzy pink collars that looked like wings, the suit made Miss Dolly look like an extremely well-developed moth.
Her off-the-cuff comments also are sometimes a little surprising; witness a recent Grammy presentation dinner in which she came to the rostrum with Wagoner to present an award and acknowledged the warm applause by making a familiar pitch for a sponsor of the Wagoner TV show: “Buy Cardui brand tablets, ladies!”
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But she seems to take herself remarkably unseriously, particularly for a country girl who has come so far so fast. Not long before the reporter left that interview that day, she seemed to touch on the reasons for that.
‘Awful lucky’
“I was tellin’ Porter the other day that I’m awful lucky to have got here and got into the business before the competition got as tough as it is now. There’s always been competition in the business, but when I started six years ago, it hadn’t really started to get hot yet, the way it is now.”
She seems to think of her success not so much as something she achieved herself but more as a gift from a lot of people… such people as her uncle Bill and Fred Foster, who really believed in her.
The reporter was home a half-hour after the interview, playing back the tape, when one of those Owepar uncles, Louie Owens, called back. “Uh, Dolly left me a note here to call you,” he said.
“She wanted me to — well, here’s what the note says,” Owens said. “‘Ask him to please be sure and put in that any success I’ve achieved in the last few years I owe to Porter Wagoner, who is a fine man and everything he appears to be.'”
All right. Whatever she says. Even if Porter does like to tell that story about Minnie Hemms.
Say hello to the real Miss Dolly (1974)
“People are always kidding me about my figure. I have too much up here. It’s always been that way, and people have always just used me as a punching bag or a guinea pig or something. People think if you’ve got anything at the top, you couldn’t come by it naturally — that you have to have it hand-made.” — Dolly Parton
By Jerry Bailey, The Tennessean (Nashville) October 20, 1974
SHE WAS STANDING THERE in the hallway, autographing pictures of herself.
The photographic image which said, “With Love, Dolly Parton” across its left shoulder didn’t exactly look like her, but either she didn’t agree or didn’t mind. It hardly seemed possible the face in the picture could ever blush. She went right on signing until the stack was finished.
Judging from Dolly’s appearance, one might have thought she was on the way to a concert or television taping, rather than just another interview. There were mounds of blonde hair — some real, some not. A white western jacket and matching pants. The face that draws stares, and, of course, the figure that feeds the imagination like a candy shop. It’s all been said before.
Prior to opening the door to her office, she told the secretary to hold her telephone calls for a while. Embarrassed, she giggled, “Don’t I sound like a big executive?” After switching seats a couple of times, she settled down in the big reclining chair behind her desk.
It didn’t seem to be where she wanted to sit, but was a matter of technical necessity, since the only plug in the room for a tape recorder was behind the desk.
THERE WERE SO MANY THINGS to talk about. The relationship with Porter Wagoner, the new band, new bus, new booking agent, new directions, new freedom. Then there were old jokes, old gossip, old habits and the good old childhood days in the Smoky Mountains. Maybe a few surprises, too. Most of it hasn’t been said before.
Since Dolly ended her seven-year partnership with Porter Wagoner, the man with wagon wheels on his coat, a lot of people have been wondering what’s going to become of her. After all, Porter had a mighty big hand in making her what she is today. That’s what she used to say.
Why did they split? Only Porter and Dolly know for sure. The reason given was Dolly wasn’t getting the recognition she deserves while riding Porter’s wagon. There were smiles and hugs and words like, “We’ve worked for this day,” but to skeptics, it all sounded too smooth and sudden.
Whether it was so peaceful is a story that probably will never be told. Dolly said she didn’t want to talk about it. However, she did say she is happy to have her freedom.
“I’ve always pretty well done things my own way as far as my personality is concerned,” she said. “But now I want to do things more my way than I have in the past. I was proud to be a part of the Porter Wagoner organization, but this gives me a chance to prove myself and carry on in my own way. This gives me a chance to do some things that I wouldn’t have felt were fair for me to suggest in his show just because I felt they would be better for me.”
Porter and Dolly still have adjoining offices on 18th Avenue South. They still are friends — even business partners in a sense — but only when it feels right. “The work we do now together is just the work we choose to do,” she explained. Sort of like Loretta Lynn and Conway Twitty or Barbara Mandrel and David Houston.
In country music, a duet album is a synonym for bonus money, so Porter and Dolly continue to cut them. During the last year, perhaps her greatest concern has been problems with her voice. She has had to curtail interviews with disc jockeys and reporters, and even hold off on autographs at times because she can’t afford to talk to the fans.
“I’ve had nodes on my vocal cords for the past year,” she said, “and I’ve had to give them a rest. I’ve done that four times in the year and been out of work for several weeks at a time. They say that if I don’t cut back, I’ll have a serious problem. It hit me at a bad time, trying to get started and re-organize. Starting the first of the year, I’m going to have to work quite a bit less.”
DOLLY PARTON’S NEW BAND is largely a family affair. Her brother, Randy Parton, fronts the group and plays bass. Two cousins, Dwight Puckett and Sidney Spiva, play drums and steel guitar. The only non-family member is Bill Rehrig, whom Miss Parton said she has “adopted” into the band. Her road manager is an uncle, Lewis Owens, who has helped her career since the earliest days.
“I didn’t use my kinfolks because they were kinfolks,” she said in a soft but defensive voice. Nobody had attacked. “I used them because I thought they were the best I could find.”
In the cases of brother Randy and cousin Dwight, she even went to their concerts and stood in the audience to see if their unaffected stage styles were what she wanted. Being very family-oriented, she said she was glad she could find suitable kinfolks, but maintained that if difficulties arise, kinship will be ignored.
Dolly Parton likes to use the time traveling between shows for writing new songs. She said she composed 17 new tunes while rolling down the highway last month in her new bus. During the four months after the split with Wagoner, while preoccupied with building her own show, not one song found its way onto paper. She said she wanted to keep her mind clear until the business matters were settled.
Songwriting means a lot to this 28-year-old entertainer. She once said she started writing songs before she could even write songs — before she ever went to school, when she couldn’t write or read or spell. Music has always been near the center of her life, and generally it’s been her music, not created by anyone else or patterned after another style.
“My writing is more personal to me than anything,” she said, “and to think that somebody would really take the time to listen… ’cause I’m saying a lot more in my songs than a lot of people may know. Even the simplest of my songs, I’ve got really deep feelings inside of them.”
IT IS PERHAPS EASILY understandable that some of Dolly Parton’s most ardent fans have tended to exercise their eyes at the expense of their ears. It is as if the fact that she is a genuine country singer with a unique style and repertoire is only a secondary feature. But to play down the importance of music to Dolly Parton would be to not understand Dolly Parton.
She may not have worked especially hard to quash the myth that beautiful blondes and brains do not run together, but a few minutes’ conversation with her would be enough to convince any skeptic that she has a good head on her shoulders, a vivid imagination, and a great dedication to succeed as a musician.
The quality of her writing, and the fact that she loves to have an audience listen carefully to each word may bring her to the attention of a new group of listeners. The “underground” country fans, the younger set, love a singer capable of putting life into lyrics.
While Dolly was with Porter, she might as well have been the cornerstone of the Nashville establishment. Few self-respecting Waylon Jennings fans would dare get caught with one of her albums in their rack. Not that they didn’t sneak a listen. Porter and Dolly simply worked for a different audience.
But with Dolly’s show of independence and the contemporary sound of her records (which are largely produced by Wagoner), there just might be a match in the making.
“You’ve got plenty of reason to think that,” she agreed. “In fact, that’s all I hear lately. People keep asking me if I’m aware of how popular I’m becoming in those areas. I’m tickled to death because I wasn’t expecting it.
“But like I said before, I’ll always be me. I won’t be no different than I have always been. I will work the college circuit. I may throw them a few songs to please them on those particular shows because I don’t want them to think I don’t care whether I work them or not. But to me, it’ll just mean more people are aware of what I can do — my writing.”
“I’m real inside,” she said. “What I wear on the outside, well, that’s got nothing to do with the way I am. I’m a totally different person from the way I look. I really am. If I was as real on the outside as I am on the inside, I would look like a blank wall.
“The reason I like my hair and pretty clothes is it’s something I never had as a kid,” she said. “I had to look and live like the hippies are looking and living now. As children, we had to wear britches with the hind end out of them and patches all over. The faded denim and stringy hair and scrubbed faces. It was fine, but we had no choice.
“So then, I automatically thought when I get grown up, I’m going to have pretty clothes and pretty jewelry and pretty make-up and pretty hairdos. I wanted to know what it feels like.
“So now, the young people have gone back to what I have already been through, and that’s what the connection is. That still laces us together. I’ve been there. I know what it feels like to live down to earth — to be earth people. I still am inside.”
ALTHOUGH DOLLY’S MUSICAL success has had a dramatic financial effect on her life, most clearly illustrated in her appearance, any change has been self-imposed. The mere thought of anyone suggesting that she conform to someone else’s tastes was enough to set her off on the afternoon of this interview, a few days before the Country Music Association award show.
She leaned back in her chair, propped her feet on the desk and spoke her piece. “I ain’t gonna never change unless I want to,” she asserted stubbornly. She may have been trying to sound tough, but the hint of a smile in her face told you she wouldn’t scare a kid on Halloween night.
“I don’t try to follow no styles,” she continued. “I told you this before and I’ll tell anybody else. I ain’t in style, but I like to think I’ve got my own style. A while ago, I was talking to some people with the CMA [Country Music Association]. I won’t mention who, but on the show — I’m going to be on the awards show — they mentioned that I should wear less hair.
“They said, ‘Has anybody approached you with the fact that you should wear less hair?’ I said, ‘No, and if they do, I’ll say I’ll not wear less hair because if I can’t be comfortable, I’m not going to be on the show. I’m not selling nothing but my talent, and I’m wearing what I please. That’s the way I feel.
“I mean it,” she said, gathering a second wind. “I thought, ‘What do they want me there for? Are they trying to make me into something different than what the CMA stands for?’ People know that I wear a lot of hair. They already know I wear makeup. My country music fans have already accepted that fact. It’s the people who don’t know no different that are trying to change me all the time. But they aren’t gonna change me.”
She was smiling openly now, but this was not a time to smile back. Miss Dolly wasn’t finished.
“It’s just like people are talking and said, ‘Well, have you heard any…'” She paused, then gathered courage. “I maybe shouldn’t mention this, but I don’t reckon it’ll hurt nothing to be honest,” she reasoned. “I won’t say who it was. They said, ‘Have you heard any controversy about the people who’ve been nominated for the awards?’ They said, ‘All kinds of people are mad because Olivia Newton-John and Mac Davis are nominated.
“They said, ‘Have you heard anything?’ I said, ‘No, I don’t even know who’s nominated. I know that I am because they told me at the office. And I know that Olivia Newton-John is because I heard it on the Ralph Emery Show.’ I said, ‘It doesn’t make any difference to me because all the country people are trying to go pop and all the pop people are trying to go country. So whoever wins, I figure it’s equal.
“I told them I would like to win the award someday, but whether I do or not won’t make me work any less hard. Because if I was working for an award, I would have quit long ago. I think it would be wonderful to win. I’m proud to be country. And I figure the CMA should know what they’re doing. If they don’t, I can’t change them.”
She stopped herself again, probably wondering how all this was going to sound in print. The Country Music Association, an organization within the industry with the stated aim of promoting country music, might not take too kindly to her airing her complaints so publicly.
“I maybe shouldn’t be telling all this,” she began slowly. “Please don’t make it sound hard like I was really fussing. All I am saying is every year I’ve been on the CMA awards show, even when I was just presenting, they have always asked me to wear less hair and makeup. Then I would be like everybody else, and I don’t want to be like everybody else. I’m not doing anything to be different. I just don’t follow people’s trends. I’ve got to do what I want to do and wear my make-up and hair like I want to.”
Dolly Parton’s reasons for wearing such generous amounts of hair go beyond mere stubbornness. She may look quite tall with the four-inch heels on her feet and golden swirls on her head, but in truth, she’s far from being a skyscraper.
“I’m little. I’m only five feet tall,” she confessed. “I’ve always had a complex about being short, so I like my hair high. I wear wigs for the convenience of it, but my own hair is blonde and long, and when I fix my own hair, I fix it the same way. I wear wigs just because I don’t like to sit for long under a hairdryer, and I don’t like to spend all day primping. A lot of people think, from the way I look, I spend hours and hours getting ready, but I can completely be dressed in 30 minutes.”
TALKING AT SUCH LENGTH about her looks perhaps was wearing Dolly’s defenses thin. Her feet still were nonchalantly propped on the desk, but she no longer seemed quite so authoritative. Maybe it was frustration and the need to vent her emotions that pushed her on.
Whatever the reason, she was talking freely, pausing only to blush with embarrassment or giggle girlishly at her confessions. Her eyes sparkled and she broke into laughter as she thought of telling off those persons who dwell on the outer Dolly Parton. Still giggling, she added, “For years, when people would talk about my dimples, I would say it’s nothing but the sinkholes in my make-up.”
“I can laugh at myself, because I’m not a pretty person,” she explained. “I mean I don’t have all that natural beauty. But I’m like every other woman. I like to look as good as I can with what I’ve got to work with. I love to play in my make-up and I love hair-dos and clothes.
“But you know, people are always kidding me about my figure. I have too much up here. It’s always been that way, and people have always just used me as a punching bag or a guinea pig or something. People think if you’ve got anything at the top you couldn’t come by it naturally — that you have to have it hand-made. You know? “It runs in our family, and it’s not that big a deal.
It used to embarrass me and hurt my feelings when people would say, ‘Yeah, I know, she went to so-and-so and had plastic surgery.’ I’m serious. But I didn’t go nowhere and have plastic surgery. It really bothered me for a long time. See, for years, since I was 13 years old, I’ve been overgrown. Really.”
“Just once…well, twice…I wore a real low-neck dress,” she confessed. “It embarrassed me to death. I sat and pulled at it, you know. I only wore it because other people talked me into doing it. I was so uncomfortable, I would rather wear a turtle neck than something low-neck any day.”
“Oh, yeah, I know about the gossip,” she said without resolution. “People have had me and Porter married and me and Charley Pride married, and then me running with everybody in the business. For one thing, it’s not true, because I’m a better person than that. And for another thing, if I was gonna run with anybody, I wouldn’t dare run with anybody in the music business because it’s like a family. I mean, that would be like running with your kinfolks or somebody.
“Everybody would know it. If you had any self-respect, you wouldn’t do it. Like I said, I don’t do it anyway.”
She grew tired of the subject and concluded, “It don’t make no difference anyway. I don’t want to come out sounding self-righteous, but people are going to say and think what they please anyway. It don’t bother me so much anymore.”
A few minutes later she was in the yard before her office, posing for pictures. She was clearly self-conscious, nervously posing her leg, trying different positions for her hands. Giggling all the while. An unseen admirer in a building across the street let go a long, low wolf whistle. Dolly pretended he wasn’t there.
DOLLY THROUGH THE DECADES
Dolly for Shure microphones (1975)
1970s: Dolly Parton – Here She Comes Again (1978)
ALSO SEE: Memories of these 70s perfumes will take you straight back in time
1980s: Dolly in 9 to 5 (1980)
1980s: as Jake Farris in the Sylvester Stallone movie Rhinestone
ALSO SEE: In the classic movie Rocky, Sylvester Stallone packed a real punch (1976)
1990s: Dolly in pink (1994)
200s: Dolly Parton in 2003
2010s: Dolly Parton’s Coat of Many Colors (2015)
2020s: Dolly Parton at the Academy of Country Music Awards (2022)
