Dolly Parton’s Friend Revealed Why She Seemed ‘Snooty’ at a Concert in New York
In the 1970s, Dolly Parton took the stage at a New York concert in front of an array of celebrities. Major musicians, actors, and artists eagerly waited to hear Parton perform. While Parton was her typical self onstage, cracking jokes and singing songs about her upbringing, at least one critic believed the act was overly calculated. Parton’s guitarist shared why it may have come across this way.
Dolly Parton’s guitarist said she was very nervous at a concert in New York
In 1977, Parton played three shows at New York’s Bottom Line to audiences that included people like Mick Jagger, Bruce Springsteen, and John Belushi. The crowd adored her, but one critic for the New Times believed Parton was overly concerned with “capturing attention than on rewarding it.” Parton’s guitarist, Don Roth, thought this resulted from nerves.
“I can tell you one thing,” Roth said in the book Dolly by Alanna Nash. “If she seemed snooty, it’s because she was scared. Because she’s scared of big city people and New York, to begin with. But if there’s one thing Dolly ain’t, it’s snooty. She’s open and funny — until she gets in a situation that she can’t handle, and then she goes into the shell a little bit. Because she doesn’t know how to be New York.”
Though Parton exudes confidence in everything she does, Roth said she still deals with nerves. She didn’t feel she fit in with the crowd of celebrities at her show.
“One thing I learned a long time ago is that Dolly Parton is still very much a little girl. She’s very uneasy in surroundings she doesn’t know,” Roth said. “I think that’s the only reason she likes her bus. It’s a security blanket to her. She leaves the concert, she goes back to her little room on the bus. And I know she’s very insecure at these press parties she does only because RCA or Katz-Gallin says do ’em. She’d rather go back to the bus and get into a sweatshirt and a pair of jeans.”
Dolly Parton admitted that the celebrity audience at the New York show threw her off
Parton confirmed Roth’s assumption that she had been nervous. She admitted that walking onstage and seeing people like Candice Bergen and Patti Smith was nerve-wracking. Luckily, the audience responded to her with such positivity that she grew more comfortable.
“I was a little nervous — on the brink of being scared,” she said. “But when I walked out on stage, I was at ease. The crowd was just great.”
She said she was incredibly nervous before her first performance
Years before this, a young Parton prepared to sing in front of a live audience on the Cas Walker Show. She was so nervous that she could hardly breathe, but she realized she would have to overcome the feeling if she wanted to be a performer.
“It was at that very moment that everything came to a head for me as a performer,” she wrote in her book Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business. “My insecurity came face-to-face with my ambition. My shyness banged head-on into my need for attention. This was what I had always wanted, and yet there was this fear. I’m not quite sure if it was the fear of failure or of success. Maybe it was both. I was either going to do this thing, and do it for the rest of my life, or not at all.”
Parton has been performing to audiences around the world since then.
