Dolly Parton Had a Crush on Johnny Cash — and Told His Wife to ‘Watch Her Step’

Dolly Parton was 13 years old when she first met Johnny Cash. The moment she laid eyes on him, she developed a crush on the singer. Years later, Parton was an established singer in her own right and became friends with Cash. She offered a joking warning to Cash’s wife, June Carter Cash.

Dolly Parton first met Johnny Cash when she was 13

Though Parton wouldn’t find widespread success until she was in her 20s, her music career began when she was still a child. Her Uncle Bill Owens often brought her to concert venues to see if they could set up a performance. They’d drive from her hometown in Sevier County, Tennessee, to Nashville.

“Uncle Bill was really good at talking to people and convincing people,” she wrote in the book Dolly Parton, Songteller: My Life in Lyrics. “And who’s going to say ‘no’ to a little kid?”

When she was 13, he managed to score her a spot performing at the Grand Ole Opry. 

“It was a special time,” she wrote. “Being on the Grand Ole Opry was a dream. That was something.”

The moment was made even more special by Cash, who introduced her to the audience.

Dolly Parton offered a joking warning to Johnny Cash’s wife, June Carter Cash

For Parton, meeting Cash was basically love at first sight.

“I was thirteen years old,” she wrote. “Johnny Cash introduced me, and I thought he was the sexiest thing that ever was. That’s when I first felt hormones raging. It was his charisma and me being a growing girl. It was the first time a man had ever made me feel like a woman.”

She explained that the crush was unlike any she’d had before.

“Back then he was all boney and skinny, but he had such sex appeal, this magnetism and it was honestly when I first felt a sense of my sensuality and sexuality,” she told The Irish Times in 2011. “He just stirred things in me, that I had never felt before.”

Years later, when Parton was also an established artist and could count Cash as one of her contemporaries, she told him and Carter Cash about the crush. She also offered a joking warning to Carter Cash.

“Years later when we were friends, I told him and June about it,” she said. “I joked with her that he was really my first love and that she better watch her step.”

The ‘I Will Always Love You’ singer wasn’t sure Cash was a good singer

Though she had the utmost respect for Cash, she wasn’t sure he was the greatest singer. Still, there was something compelling about his music.

“Johnny is dramatic,” she said, per the book Dolly on Dolly: Interviews and Encounters with Dolly Parton. “I don’t think Johnny is a good singer, but I think he is one of those people that is so believable that people can relate to it. He’s got a way of deliverin’; you just know that it had to happen if Johnny said so.”

She has said the same thing about herself in the past.