Dolly Parton Made a Vocal Injury Worse Because She Couldn’t Manage to Stop Talking

Dolly Parton’s bubbly personality has helped win her over to the public, but it once put her career at risk. Parton loves to talk so much that she once continued to speak when she should have been on vocal rest. As a result, she had to take some time away from her music career.

Dolly Parton worsened a vocal injury because she liked to talk so much

In the 1970s, Parton had been putting on concerts night after night. She had to sing loudly to come through on old sound systems and, before long, she could feel the strain on her vocal chords. Her doctor told her to cancel all her performances between late June and October.

“It’s mostly a case of overwork,” her manager Don Warden said, per the book Dolly by Alanna Nash. “It’s nothing serious, but as I understand it, if she continued her schedule like it was planned, it could become serious.”

When Parton finally got back on the road, her doctor told her she could sing, but she should avoid speaking. She struggled to follow this directive.

“When she had gone back on the road, she was told, ‘It’s not so bad to sing, but don’t talk,’” agent Dolores Smiley said. “Well, Dolly is a talker. She’ll talk to the wall, you know. She is most friendly and would meet anybody or do anybody’s interview. But instead of doing what they told her, going out and keeping her mouth shut after doing her shows, she did just the opposite, because she didn’t want her public to think she was not what they thought she was. So she really had bad throat problems.”

Dolly Parton disbanded her band following her vocal injury

Eventually, Parton took a second honeymoon with her husband to relax and rest her vocal cords. When she returned to the road, though, she realized she had to make changes. She had been working herself to the point of exhaustion, so she called a meeting with her family band and informed them that she was disbanding them for at least six months. Parton wanted to take the time to improve her health and business affairs.

“We would have preferred to be family, and they were all talented writers and singers, and some desired to have a group on their own, to record on their own, which was makin’ it hard for all of us,” she explained. “It wasn’t fair for me to just keep them tied up in a group when I didn’t have time to do any more than just my work, or to expect somebody to just play for me when they had talent of their own. We certainly parted on good terms. In fact, we just decided that it was best.”

She dealt with health problems during a later tour

Several years later, Parton found herself in a similar position. By the 1980s, she was balancing her film and music careers. The amount of work was beginning to make her sick.

“I’d never really been sick in my life until a couple of years ago, and then I was sick for 18 months to two years,” she told Interview Magazine. “It was brought on by a lot of emotional problems that I was having.”

Her grueling schedule was bad enough, but she had also recently ended an intense emotional relationship with her bandleader, Gregg Perry. His absence from her life devastated her.

“I was going through a period of time that the nerves and the tension and the stress were actually what got me sick,” Parton explained. “So then it was like, which came first, the chicken or the egg? I just kept getting worse and worse and then I started having stomach problems, ulcers and intestinal problems.”

She said the experience and time away from her career taught her that she never wanted to retire.