Dolly Parton has been navigating the music industry since she was a child. Her uncle drove her to performance venues and recording studios while she was still in school, and she made regular appearances on a local radio show. This taught her how to make her way in the male-dominated industry. According to one musician she knew, Parton didn’t let anyone push her around.
Dolly Parton always stood up for herself in the music industry
In 1956, Parton began making appearances on Cas Walker’s Farm and Home Hour. The radio show allowed her to showcase her talents to the Knoxville area and provided her with her first taste of fame. She was a child and had begun to work with older professional musicians. She didn’t appear to be intimidated by them, though.
“We had twelve or fifteen men and boys on the show and you know there’s always somebody smartin’ off,” banjo player Bud Brewster said in the book Dolly by Alanna Nash. “But she’d always take it good. You could tease her and she’d always laugh about it. And she knew how to handle ’em. She asked one of the boys to play something with her one time, and he said somethin’ smart to her, and she turned right around and throwed it back at him real heavy.”
Brewster recalled Parton’s confident response.
“You’ll pick for me, and you’ll be glad to pick for me when I get through with what I’m gonna do,” she said. “I’m goin’ straight to Cas Walker.”
Even at an early age, Parton employed language to ensure people took her seriously. Brewster paraphrase her response, noting that in reality, “it was a little more, well, it was a little stronger than that!”
Cas Walker believed Dolly Parton’s attitude helped her get ahead in the music industry
Walker, who gave Parton a shot when she told him she’d be willing to work hard to be on his show, believed she always had what it took to be successful.
“She stood her ground and didn’t let nobody push her around,” he said, adding, “She’s amazing how she gets along with people. She’s actually got no bad enemies. She don’t want to hurt nobody, but yet she don’t want nobody to hurt her. She’ll stand up — I mean, she’ll stand up like a bantam, if she has to.”
Walker said she was incredibly independent and driven. He believed that this played a role in her rise to fame.
“Couple of times I wanted to say somethin’ to her about those short dresses, but she’s the kind of person that you’re a little hesitant to say anything to, you know, ’cause she’s got a temper,” he said. “I don’t believe she ever got real mad at me, but she has at someone else, and she would have at me if I hadn’t taken sides with her. Still, I’ve seen her when I knowed that she could shoot me, but she’d just look a hole through me. I’m confident that her independent ways plus her unusual voice put her over.”
She once pulled a gun on a man
Parton’s strength, temper, and independence is present outside the recording studio, too. Years after she was on the Farm and Home Hour, Parton and a friend were out in New York City. A man began to harass them, so Parton pulled out a gun she kept in her purse.
“So anyway, this guy would not stop,” she told Yahoo. “I said, ‘If you touch me’ — and I was really angry and scared — I said, ‘If you touch me one more time, I’m gonna shoot your, you know, crotch off!’”
She proved she was a force to be reckoned with both on and off the stage.
