Some Surprising Facts about Dolly Parton Life

Dolly Parton, a country music diva with a half-century career, is one of the world’s most successful music icons. She’s created hundreds of songs, sold over 100 million records, and owns many Guinness World Records, among other honours. Aside from music, the entrepreneur and philanthropist have founded other ventures like Imagination Books and the entertainment park Dollywood, which have brought smiles to thousands of people’s faces.

So you’ve probably heard her songs and watched her movies, but with everything she’s done, we’re sure there are things about Parton you didn’t know (like the fact that her very first crush was Johnny Cash, or how she once turned down Elvis Presley). Check out these amazing facts about the “Jolene” star, who will go down in history as one of America’s most outstanding performers.

When Dolly Parton went to Nashville in 1964, she had no intention of marrying, but fate had other choices. Her future husband was waiting for her on the first day in Nashville after moving to the city to pursue her dreams. Carl Dean drove by in his pickup truck while Parton, 18, stood outside the Wishy Washy Washateria laundromat, and it was love at first sight.

Dean claims that the first thing that sprang to mind when he saw her was, “I’m going to marry that girl.” After more than 50 years of marriage, Parton and Dean are still together. Dean recalled of the 18-year-old Parton he met outside a Nashville laundromat, “My second reaction was, ‘Lord, she’s attractive.’ That was the beginning of my life.”

How many people can claim to have declined the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll? Elvis Presley fell in love with Dolly Parton’s song “I Will Always Love You” when it was published in 1974. If Elvis came knocking on your door and offered to work with you, chances are you’d jump at the event. “I was ecstatic. I told everyone that Elvis was singing that song and they all agreed.”

However, on Elvis’s scheduled recording, Colonel Tom, Elvis’s then manager, called her and told her that they would not record the song unless they received half of the publishing rights. “‘Oh no, it’s already a hit, but that’s what I’m leaving for my family,’ I thought. It had nothing to do with Elvis, who, hopefully, was also dissatisfied, “she stated.

Parton’s conversation with Barbara Walters in 1977 is featured in the documentary. Despite her sweetness and charm, Parton comes across as intelligent, proud, and capable of more than one fierce comeback. Walters tells Parton, “After inquiring if she’d be prepared to give her measurements, which she isn’t,” “You are not required to appear in this manner.

Parton responds, saying, “No, this is definitely a choice. I don’t like to be like everybody else… I would never stoop so low as to be fashionable; that’s the easiest thing in the world to do… Once [people] got past the shock of the ridiculous way I looked… they would see there was a part of me to be appreciated. Show business is a money-making joke, and I just always like telling jokes.”

The film 9 to 5 marked Parton’s acting debut in 1980. She co-starred in the movie with Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda as a trio of female employees who work for a sexist boss (Dabney Coleman), with Parton playing his secretary. Parton agreed to star in the film to write the film’s theme song in exchange for the opportunity.

Parton claims in the documentary that she kept her co-stars entertained by creating and contributing lines for the theme song, which was also titled “9 to 5.” Parton ended up writing almost 100 lyrics for the song, which went on to become a hit along with the film. She used her acrylic nails to have the beat while writing the song. The recording credits even say, “Nails by Dolly Parton.”

Parton was brought up in a one-room cabin with Eleven siblings (a recreation of her childhood house can be seen at her Dollywood theme park), and she didn’t become famous overnight. She struggled when she initially moved to Nashville at the age of 18 to pursue a career as a country singer. She didn’t lack tenacity, even if she lacked finances.

Dolly Parton while talking about her modest origins in the documentary Dolly Parton says that: I was hungry. Cried myself to sleep every night. But I did learn early on that you really had to stand up for yourself – especially being a girl in business at that time, and a country girl that did look like a dumb blonde.

Parton began her career in 1964, recording with professional musicians. Lloyd Green, a session pianist, remembers his first impression of the singer in the documentary: “Dolly was this beautiful little 18-year-old girl who seemed quite naive and uneducated. Her language was kind of crude…”

Charlie McCoy, a musician, claims that when he first met Parton, he thought, “This is an adolescent. She was extremely kind… She looked pleased to see us. ‘Whoa!’ she said as she began to sing.” McCoy also noted her self-assurance: “You have to believe you have something to offer, and I think she believed it.”

Parton’s early career led her to superstardom on The Porter Wagoner Show, where she appeared regularly for eight years. Parton and Wagoner, who died in 2007 but is shown in an earlier interview video, discuss the roots of the song “I Will Always Love You” in the documentary, and each has a distinct recollection. Parton speaks she penned the song as a good-bye when she wanted to leave Wagoner’s show.

Wagoner claims he informed Parton that she was writing too much about her life in the Appalachian Mountains and her home in Tennessee. He claimed no one would care about the things and instead she must write about the love. Whatever story is accurate, Parton has always praised Wagoner and claims that she said “learned from the best” in the documentary.

Parton’s producers didn’t want her to marry too soon in her career because they thought it would hurt her chances. Parton married Carl Dean nevertheless, and she kept it a secret for a year. In the film, music scholar Lydia Hamessley, author of Unlikely Angel: Dolly Parton’s Songs, states that keeping the marriage a secret was “very clever because she demonstrated to her producers that she could in fact have a marriage and still be successful.” 

Parton maintains a strict distinction between her public and private lives. Parton and Dean have seldom ever been seen together in public during their more than 50-year marriage. Many people, including those who work closely with Parton, don’t even know what Dean looks like. Linda Perry songwriter-producer states in the documentary that Parton “knew very early on in her career.”

Many people praise Parton’s songwriting abilities in the documentary, and the singer explains the origins behind some of her lesser-known songs, such as “The Bridge,” which Rolling Stone dubbed “one of her best vocal performances of all time.” Parton says she created the song as a teenager “sitting’ on an old bridge where I wrote songs a lot,” according to the film.

She goes on to say: “As a little child my mother used to sing all those songs that really told about tragedies.” However, the female in the song is more than “messed up.” She kills herself because she is pregnant while standing on a bridge where she had her first kiss:

Tonight, while standing on the bridge

My heart is beating wild

To think that you could leave me here

With our unborn child

Here is where it started

And here is where I’ll end it

Linda Perry, the film’s producer-songwriter, talks about “the rawness” of the song. It’s a complex subject for a songwriter who was only a little girl when she composed it.

Danny Nozell, Parton’s manager, speaks on her prodigious songwriting abilities in the film: Dolly’s writing all the time… When someone needs something written quickly, Dolly will go to the bathroom, get a Sharpie, write it on a piece of toilet paper… write a song on there, and come out and it’s ready. She’s that quick, that creative. And it’s good.

Parton addresses her ardent LGBTQ+ followers in the documentary: I have a lot of gay fans and a lot of gay friends. I have a lot of drag queen fans, too. They don’t come to see me be me; they come to see me be them. So I’m busy trying to enjoy my own self, but trying to give them what they need as well.

So I’m occupied with trying to enjoy myself while also providing for their needs. Drag queens relate with her flamboyance, she told Deadline in 2018, “and it gives them a little freedom, and they’ve always loved to look like me because they can kind of exaggerate it,” so she’s delighted and touched.

Parton’s first big musical hit, “Dumb Blonde,” looks to encapsulate the country singer’s biggest stereotype, yet the title is deceiving. “Dumb Blonde,” a track from her debut album, Hello, I’m Dolly, was her first Billboard Hot Country Singles entry in the 1967. In the film, the singer-songwriter Kylie Minogue states the song is “a feminist message pretty much in disguise.”

Parton also claims that she did not write the words to “Dumb Blonde,” but the Curly Putman’s songwriter did. The lyrics in the song, which reached at about No. 24 on the charts and they stayed there for about 14 weeks, defy “dumb blonde” stereotypes:

Parton and her 11 siblings were destitute as children growing up in their family’s home in Tennessee’s Great Smoky Mountains. Parton’s father, Robert Parton, according to Eastern Sevier County, gave a sack of oatmeal to the doctor who assisted in her delivery. Parton’s childhood home is so significant that she spent millions repairing it, even though they didn’t have much and the house lacked electricity and plumbing. “I spent a few million dollars to make it appear like I spent $50 on it!” she stated on The Nate Berkus Show.

Parton has won over 30 honours, including two Guinness World Records for the Most Decades with a Top 20 Hit on the US Hot Country Songs Chart and the Most Hits on the US Hot Country Songs Chart by a Female Artist. Guinness World Records representatives came to Nashville to present Parton with record title certificates, and she expressed her gratitude by saying she felt “humbled and grateful.” She explained, “I’ve always just written from my heart.”

During her 50 years in the entertainment sector, the queen of the country has amassed a net worth of $600 million. Parton has 25 No. 1 singles to her credit and has sold over 130 million albums worldwide. Her fortune, however, was not solely based on music. Parton began her career as an actress and radio broadcaster when she was just ten years old. She’s been in various television shows and films, including 9 to 5, created a theme park and even launched her fashion brand.

Parton opted to enter the theme park business by creating Dollywood in 1986 as a fan of the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee, where she grew up. She built the theme park, which attracts over a million visitors each year, as part of her continued attempt to invest in her rural hometown. The rides aren’t my thing. I’ve never done so.

Motion sickness is a big problem for me. I’m also a bit of a chicken. With all of my hair, I have a lot to lose, including my wig and shoes. I wouldn’t say I like being messed up. I’m going to have an attractive man that mess it up for me; I don’t want a ride to do it.”

Dolly Parton is the 3rd of twelve children born to Avie Lee and Robert Lee Parton. Robert Lee was a sharecropper who later bought some land and grew tobacco and raised livestock to raise his growing family. Sadly at the age of 79, Robert Lee died in 2003 after suffering from a series of strokes. His wife Avie soon followed him and died just four months later.

Parton’s father was most proud of her foundation to promote literacy among youngsters out of all of her accomplishments. In 1995, the renowned country singer established Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library to tribute to her illiterate father. Parton told Paper in 2015 that “Not long before he passed, he told me he was more proud of me for the Imagination Library than anything else I had ever done.”

Parton wrote both “I Will Always Love You” and “Jolene” in the same session in 1968. “When we were going through all of my stuff for the archives and getting all the stuff for the old cassettes that I used to use and putting them on hard drives and kinda upgrading everything, the same little cassette and I had three songs, and they were both back-to-back,” Parton revealed out.

Dolly Parton had a crush on country legend Johnny Cash before Carl Dean stole her heart. Parton first witnessed Cash play at Nashville’s Grand Ole’ Opry when she was a young adolescent. During the show, Parton said, “I was sitting in the audience and that’s when I first knew about sex appeal.”  “When he shifted his shoulder, he got a tick… It was still enticing. Even so, it affected me.”

Parton frequently appeared as Miley Cyrus’ “Aunt Dolly” on Disney’s Hannah Montana. Parton is Cyrus’s real-life godmother because of her long association with Cyrus’s father, country musician Billy Ray Cyrus. “I’m her honorary godmother. I’ve known her since she was a baby,” Parton told to ABC.” Her father is one of my acquaintances. ‘You just have to be her godmother,’ he said when she was born, and I answered, ‘I accept.’

Despite admitting that she “definitely would have been a drag queen” if she hadn’t been born a girl, Parton reportedly doesn’t perform drag well! At a Halloween contest on Santa Monica Boulevard years ago, where all the guys were dressed up like me, I simply exaggerated my look and went in and just stepped up on stage “, According to ABC, the country singer. “I didn’t win. I didn’t even come in close, I don’t think.”

“They had a bunch of Chers and Dollys that year, so I just over-exaggerated — made my beauty mark bigger, the eyes bigger, the hair bigger, everything,” she told ABC. “All these beautiful drag queens had worked for weeks and months getting their clothes. So I just got in the line and I just walked across… but I got the least applause.”

Parton is up and about when other people are sleeping. “I am an early riser. By 3 a.m., I’m generally awake. I go to bed early, but that’s just because I’m a morning person.” Parton said in an interview with Today. She explained, “I get up, I do my little meditations, I do my little spiritual work.” The country singer gets ready for the day after she wakes up.

The self-described junk food connoisseur keeps a close check on her eating habits. Parton told FoxNews.com, “I’m a short little thing with a big, country girl appetite so I have to really watch it.”  “I have been every size imaginable, but if I ate everything I wanted, I’d be as large as a house, so I’m a big eater.” My best bet is to stay on a low-carb diet since you can consume a lot of the foods you’re allowed on a low-carb diet.”

Parton has long claimed that a local “tramp” in her hometown was the inspiration for her style earlier. She said that at that I time, “I thought she was absolutely beautiful.” She had bleached hair, red lipstick on her lips, cheeks, and nails, as well as high-heeled shoes. Parton is always dressed to the nines as a result of this.

The “Jolene” singer has claimed that she never leaves the house without makeup on and even sleeps with it on. She has an extensive collection of wigs as well. This country singer doesn’t have a bad hair day! Parton said out, “That way I never have a bad hair day,” She had roughly 365 wings.” She chuckled, “one for each day.”

Ever wonder why Dolly Parton always wears long sleeves and fingerless gloves? Well she’s got some tattoos. Dolly has a fondness of butterflies so much so that she even wrote a song about it in 1974 called “Love Is a Butterfly.” Parton told Vanity Fair, “I don’t really like to make a big to-do of [the tattoos] because people make such a big damn deal over every little thing.” But most of the tattoos, when I first started, I was covering up some scars that I had, cause I have a tendency to have keloid scar tissue, and I have a tendency where if I have any kind of scars anywhere then they kind of have a purple tinge that I can never get rid of,” she says. “So mine are all pastels, what few that I have, and they’re meant to cover some scars. I’m not trying to make some big, bold statement.”

Since 2010, Dolly Parton has worn fingerless gloves in all public appearance… and even in some television appearance. Steve Summers who is Dolly’s Creative Director pointed it out that she does it as a fashion statement… and given the fact that she’s in her mid 70s, she doesn’t like her aging elbows and hands and chooses to cover them up. “People always ask why she always wears sleeves — well, she’s 73-years-old, and she doesn’t like her elbows,“[They ask] ‘what’s wrong with her hands?’ She’s 73, and she doesn’t like them! It’s a normal woman thing.”