Dolly Parton Got ‘Whipped’ for Her Fashion Choices as a Kid
Dolly Parton‘s family hasn’t always shared her love of glitz, glamor and rhinestones. In a new interview with the Guardian, the singer thinks back to her earliest fashion inspirations — and the punishments she suffered at the hands of her grandfather for her taste in style.
Parton famously says that she patterned her distinctive look after the “town tramp,” parlaying that woman’s style into her own love of rhinestones, blonde hair and long, colorful manicures.
“She was flamboyant. She had bright red lipstick, long red fingernails,” the singer recalls. “She had high-heeled shoes, little floating plastic goldfish in the heels of them, short skirts, low-cut tops, and I just thought she was beautiful.”
But her grandfather — a preacher and a sharecropper — disagreed. When the young Parton began to emulate her fashion icon’s look, he punished her physically.
“I was willing to pay for it,” she explains. “I’m very sensitive. I didn’t like being disciplined — it hurt my feelings so bad to be scolded or whipped or whatever. But sometimes there’s just that part of you that’s willing, if you want something bad enough, to go for it.”
Parton knows that her look initially kept some in the music industry from taking her seriously. For decades, she was associated with boob jokes nearly as often as she was with her record-breaking cross-genre country stardom. But the singer tells the Guardian the real reason that she was so attracted to the “town tramp’s” look: She looked exotic, powerful and free to a little girl growing up in a large, poor family. Parton’s own mother had 12 children by the time she was in her mid-30s.
“I did not want that for myself. My mom and my aunts — I grew up with women knowing how to be good mothers, but that was just not what God had in mind for me,” she continues. “Because somebody’s got to entertain those people, to write songs about them. I can write a song as if I had a house full of kids, I can write a song as if I’ve got a cheating husband, even though I never did. But I know what it’s like; I’ve seen it, been around it. There’s no thing in this world that’s foreign to me, that I don’t get or understand.”
Parton digs more into her personal history of fashion in her new book, Behind the Seams: My Life in Rhinestones. The book will be out on Oct. 17.
Top 20 Dolly Parton Songs: Her Biggest Hits And Most Underrated Deep Cuts
There are many country music legends in the business, but you’d be hard-pressed to find another as universally revered as Dolly Parton. Here are 20 of her greatest songs of all time.
See Dolly Parton’s Longtime Nashville Home
Dolly Parton and Carl Dean owned this 4,795 square-foot residence in Nashville from 1980 until 1996. While it’s not the lavish mansion one might expect one of the biggest country stars of all time to have lived in, it’s a beautiful home that’s also a one-of-a-kind piece of country music history.
Built in 1941. the house features four bedrooms and three bathrooms, and the wooded, 2.4-acre property also features a detached storage building. Amenities in the stucco home also include an eat-in kitchen, carport, covered porch and patio, deck, a master bedroom with a walk-in closet, a great room large enough for plenty of games and entertainment and dual heating and cooling units.
12 Rarely Seen Photos of Dolly Parton In the ’70s
These 12 rarely seen photos of Dolly Parton from the 1970s give you a look at what her life — and celebrity life in general — was like 40 to 50 years ago. There are a few country stars included in these pics, but mostly this list is filled with unexpected moments with other stars you’ll recognize.
