Description
Dolly Parton’s origin story is the stuff of country songs, including some of her own, such as Coat of Many Colors and My Tennessee Mountain Home. Born in 1946, she grew up “dirt poor” in a one-room cabin on the banks of Tennessee’s Little Pigeon River with six brothers and five sisters. As a kid, she used to imagine that the chickens in the yard were her fans. She became a child star on local radio and TV, recording her first single at 13 and moving to Nashville the day after she graduated from high school. There she wrote several hits for other artists while still in her teens, before scoring her first solo hit in 1966 with Dumb Blonde. Right from the start, she was neutering criticism by owning it.
Throughout her career she has garnered 11 Grammy Awards and 50 nominations, including the Lifetime Achievement Award; 10 Country Music Association Awards, including Entertainer of the Year and is 1 of only 7 female artists to win the Country Music Association’s Entertainer of the Year Award; five Academy of Country Music Awards, also including Entertainer of the Year; 4 Peoples Choice Awards; and 3 American Music Awards. In 1999, Parton was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame and in 2022 the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame announced her induction.
Dolly is famous for many of her quotes and is extremely apolitical. A few of her more famous quotes are:
“It costs a lot of money to look this cheap.”
“Don’t get so busy making a living that you forget to make a life.”
“You’ll never do a whole lot unless you’re brave enough to try.”
“The way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain.”
“You just try to be nice to everybody, ’cause you know everybody’s got a dream.”
“When someone shows me their true colors, I believe them.”
When I was deciding on the colors I’d use in this painting I automatically thought about her “Coat of Many Colors.” After talking to a curator at Dollywood and finding pictures of the coat online, I decided on my color palette. Hopefully this color combination highlights America’s Sweetheart as she should be!
