Dolly Parton Reminds Fans She’s Not Dumb – and She’s Also Not Blonde
Dolly Parton jumped on social media to delight fans with a throwback photo and a reminder that she’s no dumb blonde.
What is her natural hair color? And what country music star did she recruit to update her classic, “Dumb Blonde”?
Dolly Parton is ‘country smart,’ not a dumb blonde
Despite the occasional self-deprecating joke, Parton knows her strengths. And she said one is being “country smart.”
“I’m pretty sharp. I’m not educated, and I’m not that intelligent, but I’m smart,” she once said (per CBS News). “They say somebody’s street smart. I feel like if I got intelligence, it’s just a country smart.”
Parton has joked that she knows she’s not a dumb blonde, and even wrote a song to emphasize it. “Just because I’m blonde / Don’t think I’m dumb / ‘Cause this dumb blonde ain’t nobody’s fool,” she sings in “Dumb Blonde.”
But, as she’s often said, she’s not blonde, either. She reminded fans by sharing a throwback photo of big, bleached blonde hair. “I know I’m not dumb,” she captioned the post, adding, “and I also know I’m not blonde!”
Dolly Parton’s natural hair color is ‘sandy’ blonde
Parton once revealed she has naturally “sandy” blonde hair (per Interview). “I’d already bleached my hair and got in big trouble [by freshman year of high school]. I have blonde hair, but it just wasn’t radiant, it’s sandy blonde. It wasn’t yellow and white and bright,” she explained.
According to Parton, she was over the moon when she discovered how she could tease her hair to make it bigger. “When teasing came out,” she said, “I just thought I had died and gone to heaven.”
Now, Parton prefers to wear wigs. “I never could get my hair to do what I wanted it to do, so I started wearing the wigs,” she said (per Interview). But eventually, it was better for her hair not to put it through so much. She revealed that bleaching caused damage and breakage, so she turned to wigs.
“I thought, ‘Why am I going through all that? Why not just wear wigs?’” she said in a 2016 interview with Hallmark’s Home & Family. “That way I never have a bad hair day. I have a big hair day, but not a bad hair day.”
Dolly Parton enlisted Miranda Lambert to re-record ‘Dumb Blonde’
Parton re-recorded her classic, “Dumb Blonde,” for the soundtrack to the Netflix movie Dumplin’. And she brought in a fellow blonde who is also not dumb, Miranda Lambert, to sing with her on the track.
“I’d never gotten to meet [Miranda] until we re-recorded “Dumb Blonde” but we clicked immediately and we’re like soul sisters now! Hope y’all love the song as much as we do,” Parton wrote in a caption on Twitter.
As for Lambert, she said she counts Parton among her role models (per Music Mayhem). “I don’t know what kind of fairy dust was sprinkled on her but it’s just when she walks in a room, it changes the whole room,” she described.
