SOMETIMES DOLLY PARTON FEELS LIKE SHE’S
lived more than one lifetime. “When I think back to my child-
hood,” says the still-reigning queen of country music, “it’s
like we were in the Dark Ages.”
It was the kind of no-way-out poverty you might find in a
particularly aching country song. Parton grew up the fourth
of 12 children in a tin-roofed shack in East Tennessee’s
Appalachian Mountains. The home had no electricity, no
running water, no phone. “You knew you were worse off than
some,” Parton says, “but there were no really rich people
around us.” One memory runs especially deep: “ We grew our
own food. Daddy would get up in the morning and work till
he had to go to his job doing construction. Then he’d come
home and still be workin’ on the farm till way after dark. We
used to soak Daddy’s old feet. Mama had some kind of salve
she’d made up for Daddy’s hands because they’d crack and
bleed, and I remember rubbing Daddy’s hands with it.”
As she talks, Parton flicks the tips of her bright-red acrylic
nails. She is in her office in Nashville, wearing a gold-lamé
bustier and a black sequin-studded pantsuit that hugs her
larger-than-life curves. Though her appearance is about as
overdone as they come, she looks tiny and tender and, de-
spite the makeup and the wig, real. And she actually chokes
up—“Whoosh,” she says, and takes a deep breath—when she
notes, “Back in the early days, what we had was each other.”
She has walked a long country mile to get to where she is
today, but she hasn’t forgotten where she came from. In fact,
she owes her success to those humble roots.
Today, Parton, 63, is an icon, a legend, and a brand. She’s
made 80 albums, had 25 number one singles, and published
more than 3,000 of her own songs, including “I Will Always
Love You,” made even more famous by Whitney Houston
in the movie The Bodyguard. She’s also had some notable
turns as an actress (Nine to Five and Steel Magnolias, among
other films) and oversees a business empire that includes
a very profitable entertainment park called Dollywood,
located in the foothills of the
Great Smoky Mountains. And
she helms a foundation that
offers scholarships to students
in East Tennessee and supports early-education efforts.
What’s more, she’s still churning out new material. She
wrote the score for Nine to Five, the musical, which opened
on Broadway in April. Last year,
on her own record label, she released Backwoods Barbie, which
debuted at number 17 on the
Billboard 200 chart, her highest
start ever. She did a European
tour last summer that sold out
major arenas and grossed in the
tens of millions of dollars; DVDs
of two concerts are due out in
June. She’s got a children’s book
coming out the same month, and
a line of clothing and accessories
EACH STEP OF M Y WAY
Parton’s rise to fame,
clockwise,fromtop
right:at age seven; with
mentor Porter Wagoner;
in Nashville, 1965;
at a record-label party
in San Francisco, 1977.
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