When Dolly Parton Was a Starving Artist She ‘Would Do a Little Eating on the Sly at Grocery Stores’ to Survive

Dolly Parton did not become famous overnight. When she left her hometown of Sevierville, Tennessee for Nashville, she was met with some hard times. She quickly ran out of money, which often left her with not enough to eat. So the “Light of a Clear Blue Morning” did what she needed to do to survive.

Dolly Parton used depression ‘recipes’ when she got desperate 

Growing up, Parton would hear stories about what her relatives did to survive the depression. For example, they’d order something called a “pine float” from a cafe—a glass of water and a toothpick. The “Jolene” singer also made soups using ketchup and mustard as the base—another depression technique.   

“I had heard of people making soup out of hot water and ketchup,” she wrote in her 1994 memoir, Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business. “I can tell you personally it’s not very satisfying. At a time like that, you can either dine for as long as possible on your own fingernails or learn to get by some other way. I tried both.”

Dolly would graze at the grocery store 

In her time of hunger, Parton also turned to grocery stores for relief. 

“It’s not something I’m proud of, but I would do a little eating on the sly at grocery stores,” she wrote. “I would get a cart and wheel it through the aisles. While I pretended to shop, I would pick up items I could easily open and eat from the package. I would eat a bag of potato chips while pretending to check the produce for ripeness. Or I’d drink a pint of milk while trying to decide which brand of coffee I wasn’t going to buy. I would hurriedly gag down a handful of baloney and cheese while keeping an eye out for the store clerks.”

Once she’d had enough to keep her full—or as much as she could get away with—Parton would return her cart and make her exit. If she had any money at all, she’d buy what she could, something small like a pack of gum.  

“I guess, in my mind, that somehow made it better,” she wrote. “Even a basically honest person can do desperate things when hunger begins gnawing at them.”

“But I shop now at all the stores I stole from, so I more than paid them back,” the “Down From Dover” singer added.  

No food wasted

Something else Parton did to keep herself from starving was walk the halls of hotels to check for room-service trays with leftover food in them. 

“Sometimes those selfish hotel guests would clean their plates,” she wrote. “Other times I would find half of a sandwich or an uneaten piece of chicken. Occasionally, I would lift a cover and find the mother lode, part of a steak.”

The “Don’t Make Me Have to Come Down There” singer has always hated to see food gone to waste, especially “in a world where so many people are hungry.”  

“In those days, that had a personal meaning for me, and I did my best to see that, at least in that hotel, no food was wasted,” she wrote.