Dolly Parton Broke 1 Key Rule at the Grand Ole Opry
When Dolly Parton realized she wanted to be a musician, she set her sights on performing at the Grand Ole Opry. She put on small performances, but she and her Uncle Bill never lost sight of their goal of having her get onstage at the historic venue. When she finally had a chance to, she only got onstage because she broke a rule.
Dolly Parton broke the rules at the Grand Ole Opry
Parton’s Uncle Bill firmly believed in her star power, and he saved up enough money to bring her to the Opry.
“Nobody ever told me that you couldn’t do anything you wanted to do,” Parton said in the book Dolly by Alanna Nash. “I just always thought, ‘Well, all you gotta do is just go there and if you sing well, you can be on the Grand Ole Opry.’ Gettin’ the nerve was probably the hardest part, but we were always blessed with more nerve than sense anyway.”
They made it backstage, where Parton learned she could not just waltz onstage and sing to the audience. She was too young, and it wasn’t done.
“Ott Devine said that I was too young, but now I know it was just rules — you can’t just walk in and be on the Grand Ole Opry,” she said. “But I didn’t give up that easy. And my uncle and me kept talkin’ to everybody backstage, worryin’ ’em to death, I’m sure.”
Finally, another performer, Jimmy C. Newman, gave her his spot. Manager Ott Devine wouldn’t have been happy about it, but she slipped past him.
“Her name was not on the list,” Devine said. “I turned her down because we had a policy against using children that age. You had to be eighteen years old, an adult. She just sneaked in there with Jimmy.”
Dolly Parton said shared how she worked through her nerves
Johnny Cash introduced Parton to the audience, which made the experience begin to feel real for her. She would actually be getting onstage.
“Now the reality hit me. I had that same feeling I had felt the first time on the Cas Walker show, but this time the audience was ten times as big,” she wrote in her book Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business. “Not only the live audience: I knew very well that the radio broadcast was going out live all over the country. I was in the big time. If it hadn’t been for that earlier experience, I don’t know if I would have ever been able to make a sound come out of my throat.”
She had been dreaming of the moment for so long, but she still felt like a tourist on the stage.
“‘This is actually it,’ I thought. For a split second I was a tourist as I pondered the mike, the same one I had seen in so many press photos of the stars I looked up to,” she wrote. “I was standing on that same stage in the same place they had stood, where five seconds ago Johnny Cash had stood welcoming me to the stage — me, little Dolly Rebecca Parton from Locust Ridge.
She said the audience’s reaction overwhelmed her
As it turned out, her age was not a detriment to her. When she finished singing, the audience was uproarious.
“I was stunned by the way the crowd reacted,” she wrote, adding, “I don’t think I had ever seen two thousand people in one place before. I know I had never heard a crowd cheer and shout and clap that way. And they were doing it all for me. I got three encores. This time I was prepared for an encore, but not three, not at the Grand Ole Opry.”
Parton believed the experience set her up for future success. She had boldly announced herself to a large crowd and got a taste for live performance.
“Someone told me later, ‘You looked like you were out there saying, “Here I am, this is me.”’ I was,” she wrote. “Not just to that audience but to the whole world.
