Dolly Parton's 'dirt poor' childhood and being inspired by 'hard-working' dad
She has made millions singing about working 9 to 5, but Dolly Parton says that for her tobacco-farming dad, that would have been barely half a day.
The 77-year-old country music legend says she gets her work ethic from Robert Lee, who rose at 4am to toil in Tennessee. She says: “I like to work, I’m just like my daddy in that respect. The work’s never too hard, never too long, if I’ve got a reason to be doing it.”
It has paid off for Dolly, who has sold more than 100 million records, had 110 charting singles, 25 No1s and published more than 3,000 songs. She shows no sign of slowing down, her 49th solo album, Rockstar, being her highest-charting LP ever, debuting at No3 on the Billboard chart.
Dolly was one of 12 children born to Robert Lee and his wife Avie. Dolly says the family were “dirt poor”. But she has fond memories of rising early to spend time with her father.
She says: “I’d let Mama sleep in and I’d get up with Daddy and pack his lunch and me and Daddy would talk and to me those hours were precious. “My daddy worked like a dog, my daddy was a hard worker and worked from sun up to sun down. Daddy had to get up at four o’clock.”
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Dolly has sold more than 100 million records (Getty Images)But she feels she got her creative gift from her mum. Dolly says: “She could tell you anything and make it sound good, she could cook anything and make it taste good and she could sew anything and make it look pretty good.
“I’d say I got my creativity and spirituality mostly from Mama’s people as we’re all musical, everybody plays, sings.” Dolly is speaking as she looks back on her life in a new Channel 5 show, Dolly Parton: In Her Own Words.
Dolly recorded her first single, Puppy Love, when she was just 13 years old. She was smart, too – the first person in her family to graduate from high school.
But the day after she graduated, Dolly got on a bus to Nashville. She says: “I wanted to be a star. I wanted to travel, I wanted to be rich, I wanted fancy clothes and all the stuff a kid wants, especially when you’ve never had any.
“I believed I could do it. I thought my talent could take me there.” It was 1964 and within days of moving to Nashville, Dolly was in the Wishy Washy Laundromat when she met Carl Thomas Dean. They married two years later.
While Carl has shunned the limelight – only ever appearing at one showbiz event with his wife – they are still very much happily married. And Carl was one of the reasons Dolly put her country roots to one side and made her rock album, with nine new tracks and 21 covers.
Dolly recently released a rock album (Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)She says: “A lot of the songs that I did on the rock album are favourites of my husband. My husband is a rock and roll person, that’s his music, the harder the better.” One of the songs on the album is a cover of Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven, a song Dolly previously recorded with a more country, bluegrass feel in the early 2000s.
Talking about the time she told Carl her plans to give the classic a Dolly twist, she says: “My husband is a Led-head, he loves Led Zeppelin and he said, ‘I wouldn’t do that if I were you, because that’s a classic.’ He said, ‘I don’t think anyone should be fooling with that song.’
“I did it anyway. So I played it to him and he said, ‘Are you sure that’s Stairway to Heaven, not Stairwell to Hell’.” He was joking, and conceded her version was “OK”. But she says: “That’s why I thought I have to redo this. I thought, I’m going to do it in its natural form.”
Other songs on the album include the new single, Rockstar. And stars, including Emmylou Harris, Sheryl Crow and Simon Le Bon, sing with her on some of the tracks. Dolly also felt she should release a rock album to justify her inclusion in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. She first turned it down in 1999, saying: “I don’t feel I have earned the right.”
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But they kept asking, and Dolly accepted in 2022. She says: “I thought, I’ve got to earn my keep, so I’m going to do that rock album I’ve always dreamed of.”
Surprisingly, she has never had a UK No1, but she proved her popularity here when she played Glastonbury in 2014. She says: “I was a little apprehensive. As soon as I walked out, there was a tremendous roar.”
But Dolly, who also has a Dollywood theme park and her own record label, thinks her biggest achievement is her Imagination Library, a global charity giving free books to kids. She says: “My daddy couldn’t read or write, as smart as he was, and he was always embarrassed about that.
“So I came up with that little idea, Imagination Library. Daddy got to live long enough to see it doing really well. Daddy got such a kick out of the kids calling me The Book Lady and I could tell Daddy was so proud.”
*Dolly Parton: In Her Own Words, Channel 5, 9pm, December 29.
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