Dolly Parton Used to Wonder if She Was Really Her Parents’ Child Because Her Sisters Were so Much Prettier Than Her
Dolly Parton is a Parton through and through. But there was a time when she was young that she questioned if she was really related to her sisters, specifically. As a little girl, Parton wasn’t a fan of her looks. She wanted to look like the women she saw in newspapers and magazines. And she thought her sisters were beautiful.
Dolly Parton disliked her looks as a girl
Parton learned about femininity from her aunts when they’d come to visit. They brought stories with them about life outside of East Tennessee and purses filled with makeup. The “Down From Dover” singer thought of them as the pinnacle of sophistication. Once young Dolly got a taste for the finer feminine things in life, she was ravenous. She wanted to be beautiful. But she didn’t think she was.
“The quest for beauty has always been a struggle for me,” she wrote in her first memoir, Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business. “I can’t remember anybody ever saying that I was one of the more beautiful children they had ever seen. I was a pale, skinny little thing with corn teeth and hair that was fine and close to my head.”
Most of all, Parton disliked her freckles.
“And then there were those hated freckles,” she wrote. “You could not have said that I was ‘as cute as a speckled pup’ without expecting the speckled pup to piss on your leg out of resentment.”
The ‘Jolene’ singer used to wonder if she wasn’t related to her pretty sisters
Poor Parton found herself so ugly and her sisters so beautiful that she sometimes wondered if they were really related. Though thinking it through, she knew she was her mother and father’s child. It would have been nearly logistically impossible for her not to be.
“I sometimes even wondered if I was indeed my parents’ child, since my sisters all looked so good,” she wrote. “However, since it would require some hanky-panky on my mother’s part for it to be otherwise, I have no real doubts. Even if she had the inclination, she never had the opportunity. The old adage about keeping your wife ‘at home, barefoot and pregnant’ was never carried out more conscientiously, although I suppose my mother did wear shoes on most occasions.”
The “Light of a Clear Blue Morning” singer’s early perception of her looks stayed with her into adulthood.
“Those old seeds of doubt about my looks have grown into quite a bumper crop for many a makeup artist, wig maker, and plastic surgeon,” she wrote.
Dolly Parton often felt like she didn’t belong in her family
Though the “Don’t Make Me Have to Come Down There” singer figured with certainty that she was indeed a member of the Parton family biologically, she often felt like a black sheep.
“I still felt like I didn’t belong,” she wrote. “I was just different and I knew it. A Person might think that a kid growing up with that many others would never be lonely, but I often was.”
To help with the loneliness she felt, Parton came up with her own version of imaginary friends.
“I called them my angels,” she wrote. “I would talk to my angels all the time. I felt safer because they were with me. They understood why I had to sing, why I had such dreams, why I wanted to climb aboard a butterfly and wing my way out of the holler and into a world that I knew lay beyond what I could see.”
