What Would Dolly Do?

Chapter One

Put Wings on Your Dreams

Dolly Rebecca Parton was born in 1946 near the Little Pigeon River in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains of East Tennessee. She was the fourth child of twelve—after Willadeene, David, and Denver and before Bobby, Stella, Cassie, Randy, Larry, Floyd, Freida, and Rachel—born in a two-room wooden cabin with no toilet, shower, or electricity. When the doctor came to deliver her, he was paid with a bag of cornmeal because her parents had no money.

So began the journey of one of the world’s most enduring, successful, and beloved singers, a self-described “Cinderella story, the rags-to-riches kind.” Her father was a sharecropper and sometimes construction worker or coal miner, and her mother, as Dolly says, was pregnant so much she always had one baby on her and one in her. The children had many chores and minimal entertainment, other than an old battery-operated radio that, when it was working, would occasionally bring The Lone Ranger or the music of Hank Williams and the Carter Family singing at the Grand Ole Opry into their house.

Dolly grew up in poverty and she speaks of it openly: “We didn’t have the things we wanted but we didn’t starve… we were hungry for a variety of things but as far as going hungry with our bellies empty, we never had to do that. We just had simple things. Like for breakfast we always had just gravy and biscuits. For dinner and supper we had beans and potatoes. We were lucky to have it.” Much of what they ate they grew or shot themselves.

Her father labored so hard his hands and feet would bleed. Her mother prepared and cooked meals, made their clothes, and did countless other chores. In her song “In the Good Old Days (When Times Were Bad),” she writes about getting up before the sun to work in the fields only to watch a hailstorm destroy those crops, or waking up with ice and snow on the floor and watching her parents suffer through overwork and illness. She says that there is no amount of money that would be enough to make her go back and live through those times again.

Given her parents’ never-ending responsibilities, little Dolly was alone a lot. They had no TV or movies and very limited reading material, so she learned to entertain herself. She would find quiet spaces to sit and just stare at the clouds for hours at a time, dreaming and making up stories, playing out fantasies in her mind. The perfect escape for a child who didn’t like school and did whatever she could to get out of working in the fields was “fairy stories, fairy tales. I used to just live in them.” They used old newspapers as wallpaper in their two-room cabin and so she would read the walls. Her imagination was so active that she would create lives and stories around the people and things she read about.

Soon she moved on to creating fairy tales with herself at the center of them. She began imagining and planning a better life for herself. She loved writing songs and performing from a young age and realized that her talent and passion could help her achieve the big life she wanted. The difference between Dolly and the majority of people is that she not only believed deep down in her soul that her vision would come true, but she also did everything in her power to make it happen. She says, “I’m a dreamer, but I’m a doer, too.” She took those hard times and created music from them. She was a self-taught singer, musician, and songwriter with minimal education, but her ambition, drive, and relentless work ethic made her a star.

Young Dolly had plenty of time to run wild, to dream, and to gain admiration by making up little songs. Her first, “Little Tiny Tassel Top,” composed at age five, was an ode to her corncob doll with corn-silk hair that her father had made for her. She had her mother write down the lyrics. She says that “when people would come around, Mama’d say, ‘You gotta hear this little song Dolly wrote!’ I loved it, of course, and I thought, ‘Well, I’ll stay with it.’” She would stand on the porch, pretending she was onstage, and sing to the chickens and younger children with a tin can on a tobacco stick as a microphone.

By the age of eight, she was performing at the Church of God, where her grandfather preached, and went around singing in other churches with her siblings as the Parton Sisters. Her entire family was musical and she claims she wasn’t the most talented but she was “the one with the dreams and the confidence. From the time I was little I always loved music.”

She was determined to get out and see the world beyond her own hills. “I learned there was this place you could go to become a star. It was called Nashville.” She tells the story of having a semireligious experience as a young child: “I didn’t hear a voice, but it was a knowing that came to me and it said, ‘Run. Run until I tell you to stop.’”

She’s been running toward her dreams ever since.

She taught herself to play chords by making herself a homemade instrument from old musical parts. Her mother’s brother, Bill Owens, was the first person to recognize her talent and gave her a real guitar and taught her chords. He appreciated her determination to learn and her ability to go beyond just chords to coming up with little melodies. When she was just ten, he took her to Knoxville to audition for the Cas Walker Farm and Home Hour, an early-morning variety show, which was her initial break into show business. She was on television before her family even had one.

As a songwriter himself, Uncle Bill knew Nashville a bit, and when Dolly was old enough, they would drive there in his beat-up old car and try to get people to listen to their songs. “We used to come down in his rickety car any time we could beg, borrow, or steal enough money for gas. We’d clean up in service stations. I’d wash my hair in those old, cold sinks and put my makeup on in the mirrors in the car.” She would stand outside the Country Music Hall of Fame and look at all the famous names written on the pavement and vow to herself that someday her name, too, would be there. (It is.) Through it all, she says, “There wasn’t ever a time I thought I wasn’t going to make it.”

If anyone ever figured out the American dream and made it work, it’s Dolly Parton. Her ability to imagine a better future for herself, as well as her hard work and determination, got her out of the holler. How did she achieve her dreams against all odds?

If You Don’t Like the Road You’re On, Start Paving a New One

Even though she had her family and their love, and despite the somewhat romanticized view of her past that she presents now, Dolly craved to see the world beyond the foothills of the Smoky Mountains: “I had my songs to sing. I had an ambition and it burned inside me. It was something I knew would take me out of the mountains.”

What is a dreamer except a person who believes that the impossible can become possible? As children, we daydream and imagine who or what we will be when we grow up. But once we are adults, the challenges of day-to-day reality can impinge on that ability to dream, to our detriment. Especially when we’re going through challenging times, it’s important to be able to imagine a brighter future. Call it hope or optimism or faith, dreaming is the belief that you can make your own life better. In Dolly’s own words, “You can think yourself rich or you can think yourself poor.” While it’s certainly more complicated than that, her point is that your thoughts and aspirations are powerful and that being able to imagine yourself being successful is the first step to getting there. Whatever success you might have, it all starts with a vision of what is possible.

She is a big believer in using and exercising her own mind’s power to make things happen for herself and carves out time and space to dream. At a young age, she started paving a new road for herself, saying, “I dreamed of the time that I’d have money and I’d be rich and I would have pretty clothes and makeup and jewelry and houses and cars—big cars and houses. I just dreamed of all the things that I would have. And I dreamed of singin’ and I dreamed of bein’ famous and loved.”

But dreaming doesn’t happen if you are operating on autopilot. Sometimes you need to take a time-out just to let yourself think on what it is that you want. It may seem easier said than done, but having that solitude and relaxation where you can just let your mind go on adventures is sometimes the best way to restore yourself and come up with your best ideas. As an adult, Dolly says she does her best dreaming on the front porch, and she schedules specific time to sit there alone in contemplation. Dolly’s version of dreaming is songwriting or setting goals for herself. It could start with the unimaginable or what may not seem possible. But you have to start somewhere. If you want to build a business, you have to imagine it first. If you have an idea for an invention, you have to dream it up first and then map it out. If you want to be an actress, a writer, an artist, a musician, you have to picture in your mind where you want to go with it and then learn the skills required to help you get there.

Be a Dreamer, But Be a Doer, Too

It’s one thing to dream of being in a fairy tale, like so many children do, but it’s another to turn your life into one. You can’t just sit around wishing things would happen; you have to go out there and get stuff done. Or as Dolly says, “If you never try, you ain’t never going to win.” Having a strong vision puts a fire in your belly that provides conviction, which, in turn, provides motivation to do the hard work required. That will sustain you, not just on your way up, but when you are beaten down and challenged, which you most certainly will be at some point.

When journalist Chet Flippo did his first Rolling Stone interview with Dolly back in 1977, he mentioned that she was known for setting goals and writing them down, which, he wrote, “set her off on a 45-minute discussion on achieving and how to do it.” She then said she has always created elaborate and specific lists along with detailed plans on how to get things done, and then hides them away, where no one can see them. In doing so, she takes what she imagines and makes it a little more concrete, a little bit closer to reality, planting the seeds in the back of her mind. When she goes back years later and reads through these lists, she is often amazed to see that most of what she wrote down has come true: “I think, boy, if that ain’t proof that positive thinkin’ is a marvelous thing.”

Stating your intentions and writing down your goals and dreams makes you think them through and sends a message to the universe. Dolly’s list-making methods include a combination of positive thinking and visualization. If there is something that she really wants, she will “write it down on a piece of paper and I look at the list and I concentrate real hard on it, try to visualize it happening, and I just go through all the motions as if it’s already been done.”

Once you’ve written down your own list of dreams, you need to do things that will make them happen, using whatever it is you’ve got. The Partons were nothing if not creative in their ability to be innovative by making the most of what they had. When Dolly used to sit on the woodpile in her potato-sack dresses pretending she was onstage in sequins and silk, she played on an old mandolin she had repurposed with piano strings. “Waste not, want not” was a motto in her household, so old newspapers became wallpaper, corn husks became dolls, old scraps of cloth and rags became clothes and blankets. They made their own toys, cut down their own Christmas trees, and decorated them their way without any real ornaments. They used their imaginations. Not just in making things but in finding ways to get around things. That kind of resourcefulness and ingenuity served her well throughout her life and career and is something we can all keep in mind as we try to find our way around obstacles.

The first time Dolly was set to appear on Cas Walker’s show, she happened to be there the day of Cas’s greasy pole contest. Cas would grease a fifty-foot pole and put $250 at the top of it. Whoever could climb the pole and retrieve the prize money without slipping down got to keep it. Dolly watched one person after another slip down the pole. So she got an idea. She poured water on herself to get all wet, then went outside and rolled around in the dirt and sand. When her turn came, she scooted right up the pole and got the money. People were angry that she won and thought the contest had been “fixed.” Cas had watched the whole thing and said, “How could a greasy pole be fixed? This girl has taught me something today and that in itself is worth $250.” Dolly took the money and bought her family their very first television set, the only one in her neck of the woods. When Dolly got a spot singing on his show every Saturday, her family could now watch her on TV.

Upon arriving in Nashville she had nowhere to live or money for food, she bartered babysitting in exchange for a place to stay and filled salt and pepper shakers at a diner in return for free food. All the while she kept writing songs, knocking on doors, learning the ins and outs of the music business, and distributing demos of her songs.

Let Your Determination Be Greater than Your Fear

Dolly has said, “I always had more guts than talent.” When Dolly was ten years old, she sang a song on the radio for the first time. She said she was scared to death but she did it anyway, despite her lack of experience and not knowing how to work a microphone. The crowd roared with approval and not because she was good but “just because I had the nerve to do it.” Focusing on negative thoughts or fear can keep you where you are. Or you can choose to turn things around and forge ahead. One small courageous act can provide the confidence you need to climb the next step.

After her first radio appearance Dolly’s confidence grew and she went on and fulfilled her first “big” dream of singing at the Grand Ole Opry at age thirteen. From there the dreams just kept getting bigger and bigger. She has said, “I’ve felt like my dreams were the foundation of my drive to accomplish all the things I love.”

Not everyone understands that power or has the imagination to believe in a better life or future. Throughout her life, other people underestimated her; they even laughed at her. When she graduated from high school and everyone had to stand up in front of the class and say what they planned on doing, she said, “I’m going to Nashville and I’m going to become a star.” There was a pause and then the whole room started snickering and laughing. She was embarrassed but she didn’t let that deter her. She was on a Greyhound bus to Nashville the next morning and she told herself she wasn’t going back until she made it. She didn’t let the doubters drag her down. Like Dolly has said over and over, don’t limit yourself just because people won’t accept the fact that you can do something else or do more. Their limited imaginations are their problem, not yours. So show them what you’re made of.

Dolly’s drive is pretty intense but you don’t get to where she is by being wishy-washy. “I’ve always loved what I do, and try to just do my best work. I don’t try to outdo somebody else—I try to outdo me. I try to make and break my own records. I try to do better at something than I was last year.”

Once you know what it is you want, never stray from it. Like Dolly says, “You can do anything you want to as long as you keep a good attitude and keep working at it. But the second you give up you’re screwed.” In other words, keep your mind on your business despite the inevitable bumps on the journey. Have laserlike focus. When you really know yourself and your strengths and talents and are willing to make the necessary sacrifices to get what you want, to be who you want, well, you almost can’t lose.