Dolly Parton’s Mom Had ‘Startlingly Accurate’ Visions About the Future
Dolly Parton admired her mom for a number of reasons. She raised 12 children in a one-bedroom home with both strength and kindness. She also received visions that came in handy for the Parton family. Parton said her mother’s premonitions were accurate enough that they may have saved her brother’s life.
Dolly Parton’s mom had a very strong intuition
When Parton was young, she realized her mother had abilities that set her apart from most other people.
“Mama had premonitions — ‘visions,’ she called them,” Parton wrote in her book Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business. “They could be startlingly accurate.”
Parton said her mother had these visions often enough that everyone in her family implicitly believed them. Their trust in her likely saved Parton’s brother’s life.
“One night, years later, she sat up in her bed and said to Daddy, ‘Lee, get your clothes on. Denver’s had a wreck at the Cove bridge.’ By this time, Daddy knew not to take Mama’s sixth sense lightly, so he drove her to the bridge,” Parton wrote. “There was Denver’s wrecked car with the wheels still spinning. Denver had broken his neck and would not have survived if he had not been found early. In that remote area, he could easily have lain there all night.”
Parton could not explain why or how her mother had these visions, but she wondered if they had something to do with her love for her family.
“I don’t know what gave Mama the power she had, unless it was that her care for her children was so intense that it could reach beyond the boundaries of time and distance.”
Dolly Parton said her mom also made a miraculous recovery from an illness
Parton also believed her mother’s love for her family shone through while she was recovering from an illness. When Parton was a child, her mother fell ill with spinal meningitis. Doctors did not believe she would survive.
“Mama’s fever got so high that she had to be packed in ice,” Parton wrote. “In spite of all the doctors did, she slipped into a coma. A great effort was made to hide the truth from us kids, but the doctor told a few relatives that there was no way Mama would live. Worse yet, if she were to live, the fever had been so high that she would no doubt suffer such brain damage that she would be no more than a vegetable.”
Friends and family members prayed for her through the night and, miraculously, she woke up. When she did, she gave an account of her near-death experience.
“Daddy and the others listened in awe as she told of going through a long tunnel, moving toward the brilliantly glowing white light at the end of it,” she wrote. “Mama said she saw her family and friends all there waiting for her. But she heard us kids calling her back . . . calling her back to life. Well, we kids always did scream louder than anybody. I’m glad we won.”
She said there were a number of people in her community who were clairvoyant
According to Parton, her mother was not the only person in their Tennessee community who could see into the future.
“There were always those old people in the mountains who were clairvoyant or who could prophesize,” Parton wrote in her book Dolly Parton, Songteller: My Life in Lyrics.
She even said that another person even predicted her success.
“She laid her hands on me and said, ‘This child is anointed,’” Parton recalled. “I was little, so I said, ‘Mama, what does ‘anointed’ mean?’ She said, ‘That probably means that you’re going to do great things for the Lord and do good things in life.’”
