Did you know Dolly Parton’s unique voice (high soprano with ultra-fast vibrato) was considered “unsuitable for the genre” when she first arrived in Nashville? That’s why she ended up first founding success as a songwriter. She moved to Nashville the very next day after high school graduation.
Born on January 19, 1946, in a one-room cabin in southern Appalachia, Dolly Rebecca Parton is the 4th of 12 children born to Avie Lee Caroline and Robert Lee Parton Sr. Today, a replica of the Locust Ridge cabin resides at Parton's namesake theme park Dollywood.
Her father was an illiterate sharecropper and later bought a small tobacco farm. Parton has often commented that he was one of the smartest people she ever knew. His father was a Pentecostal preacher, so Little Dolly began performing in church at age six. At seven, she started playing a homemade guitar.
Dolly Parton singing a soul-stirring Easter song, “He’s Alive”:
Dolly Parton grew up listening to her mother (of Welsh ancestry) sing 18th and 19th century ballads from the British Isles.
Soon Parton started writing songs about her family’s extreme poverty, including “In the Good Old Days (When Times Were Bad)” and “Coat of Many Colors” about when her mother could not afford to buy her a coat for the winter, her so she made her a coat out of a bunch of old rags. When the kids made fun of her at school, her mother told her it was a special coat of many colors, just like Joseph’s in the Bible (Genesis 37:3).
The multi-talented country legend has sold more than 100 million records worldwide and counting. She is also a huge philanthropist. She says she always prays that God give her “enough to spare and enough to share.”
This year, she released her first rock album at 78 years of age, making her a bone fide rockstar as well. In 2024, Beyonce recorded her version of Parton’s hit song “Joline” on her own ground-breaking country album. Like Whitney Houston (who recorded “Greatest Love Of All”), Beyonce introduced Dolly Parton to a whole new generations of fans.
Dolly Parton’s Tricks of the Trade
How does she play the guitar so well with such long fingernails? Easy (once you know the trick) .
As a guitarist, I was so glad a fellow guitarist told me Dolly Parton pre-tunes the guitar to main chord she needs (not standard tuning at all), so that she can simply strum the guitar, using the left hand minimally on the fingerboard. Then she plays the last string (6th string) to make it sound like a mean bass-line without having to cut her fingernails. All the fancy finger work is done with the fingernails on the right hand picking the strings. Brilliant out of the box thinking!
I guess if you can make a guitar from scratch, you can tune it any way you want.
Another trick that greatly helped her gain recognition is her iconic look. Platinum hair piled high and lacy dresses with intricate bead-work, the Dolly Parton look was borrowed from the town streetwalker she remembered from her childhood, which may be why it is vaguely reminiscent of an earlier era.
Not everyone was impressed, however. Before she was famous, but after she started making money, she and a friend “who didn’t look any better than me,” Parton said in an interview, went to New York City for the first time and checked into a hotel. So far so good. But when they returned from dinner, they were greeted with uniform frowns and their luggage was lined up at the curb. Hotel staff genuinely thought they were “working girls!”
Parton quickly learned she needed to hire a stylist to help her incorporate her own personal “cheap tastes,” as she says, in a way that would be acceptable to the public.
As she’s fond of saying, “I pay I lot of money to look this cheap.”
Real Authenticity & Our Fraudulent Economy
Using every trick in the book, however, wouldn’t have worked for her if there hadn’t been something real there to genuinely connect her with the public. Sincerity and real authenticity happen to be among her many fortes.
When Dolly Parton played Las Vegas, the casino management had to tell her to stop singing certain songs because patrons were leaving the casino, often with tears in their eyes, so touched were they by the lyrics of her songs written straight from the heart.
It seems to me the rural poverty of her childhood left the human spirit in tact. This was before Bill Clinton’s opioid epidemic (making legal what is basically heroin, signed into law 1999) became the scourge of rural America, back when people were housed.
Be it ever so humble, even the dirt poor always had homes throughout history, of course! The current unreasonable economic landscape has very much been created for us. It is unnatural.
The rural and urban poverty I recall seeing in my youth in the South was dignified. I’d never seen a homeless person, much less a working homeless person! I can’t help but ask: Why are housing demands now going unmet in a capitalist economy?! Isn’t the whole point of capitalism to meet demand? Artificially high housing prices prevent a basic necessity from being supplied!
When President Jimmy Carter was age 11, he bought 5 rental properties (tenement shacks, really) with his own money earned from selling roasted peanuts in town, and then investing the money in bales of cotton! Poor people need housing. Period. Who doesn’t know that.
I suppose this proves we no longer have capitalism in America — what shall we call this strange post-capitalism that seems intent on throwing away a huge percentage of its own citizens? It is cannibalism and it’s not sustainable for long.
As Dolly Parton says, they may have been dirt poor, but they had love and they had one another, and truth be told, they didn’t know they were poor! Everyone was struggling. They were still able to develop their talents, and enjoy life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness very much to everyone’s benefit.
For as successful as Dolly Parton is, she just may be underrated still.