Dolly Parton Said 1 of Her Songs Is ‘Plumb Pitiful’
While Dolly Parton has a bubbly personality, she has written many sad songs throughout her career. Parton has admitted that some even move beyond the sad and into the utterly miserable. She once introduced a song as “pitiful” before using it to bring her audience to tears.
Dolly Parton said one of her songs was sadder than most
During a concert, Parton joked with the crowd before introducing one of her sadder songs.
“I want to do a song for you now that’s also kinda special to me,” she told an audience, per the book Dolly by Alanna Nash. “You know, a lot of the songs that I write are sad, and some of ’em are just plumb pitiful, and I think this might be one of them.”
Nash said that the audience laughed at Parton’s descriptor but quickly quieted once she started playing. The song, “Me and Little Andy” brought the enraptured audience to tears.
“The crowd laughed again,” Nash wrote. “But no one was laughing when she finished her song, ‘Me and Little Andy,’ and a collective tear could be heard to fall underneath the audience’s overwhelming applause.”
Real children inspired her to write it
While Parton said “Me and Little Andy” wasn’t exactly based on a true story, she took some inspiration from children she knew growing up.
“Well, I sorta linked it to some kids back home where their mama was pretty wild and their daddy was a drunkard,” she said, per the book Dolly on Dolly. “They’re just as poor as we were and as big of family as we had. They used to kinda hang around our house a lot and mama always kinda took ‘em in. But it wasn’t like the exact story, but it was because of that, in the back of my mind.”
It didn’t shock her when she saw people in the audience crying as she played it, as it happened all the time.
“It’s sad, boy. When I do it on stage I look out in the audience and see ‘bout five or six people just a-slinging tears and that other stuff they sling,” she said. “And sometimes when I’m singing’ it, I sling some of it myself!”
A fan once got angry at Dolly Parton for playing the song
While the song brought people to tears, Parton loved playing it.
“This was an odd song to be putting on a pop album,” she wrote in the book Dolly Parton, Songteller: My Life in Lyrics. “A lot of people said, ‘That is so out of place.’ I said, ‘Well, I was just trying to get some of my own songs on that record.’ And I love performing that little song.”
Not everyone appreciated it as much, though.
“I remember once we were in Las Vegas, and I had it in my act,” she wrote. “This guy in the audience hollered out, ‘Don’t sing that damn song in a nightclub! It’s bad enough that the kid died! Did you have to kill the damn dog, too?’”
She understood that after a few drinks at a concert, the song could be hard to handle.
“I thought, ‘It’s hard enough for regular people who ain’t drunk to deal with some of the sorrow that I throw at ’em,’” she wrote. “Some people want to kick my a** for writing such sorrowful songs. That guy cussed me out, big time.”
