Dolly Parton - On the Record with Ralph Emery - 1994

[Music] [Applause] hello everybody welcome to our show and this week we're going to celebrate on this show a sensational new book it's the story of our guest star i've read the book and i recommend it to all of you and i'm going to paraphrase some from something she wrote in her book she's a movie star her concerts are all sellouts she's been named country music entertainer of the year her albums are platinum her face is everywhere her boobs are everywhere and her name is a household word ladies and gentlemen dolly parton well thank you and hello ralph how are you i'm just great looking forward to our show here thank you and congratulations on the success of it but then everything you do is good and i've been on every show you've ever had since you were little that's right do you have when we were both but certainly since we were young i love your book well thank you very much i worked very hard on that and tried to be as honest and as open as it could not hang myself or somebody else why did you write a book well a lot of people are very interested in in my life and i'm almost 50 now and i have lived a very uh full life and i started when i was 10 and i thought well i want to write this book before i forget so it's like i say in the book i think i have the crn disease already can't remember nothing but i forget it but anyhow i just really felt like there were a lot of people that wanted to know a little more in detail about a lot of things about my life that i just kind of graze over in interviews things you really can't get all that involved with and i just really took the time to do it while i remembered because i figured next 50 years i'll write another one well now your associate don warden told me you had been writing on this book for 10 years well i have i have actually the last three that seems like that's about all i've done even though i have been doing other work but the last three years night and day any spare moment i've had i put it had it put together but i planned it and we started making the deal on it about 10 years ago and you wrote this yes you didn't this is not as told to someone no this is i had angel angel writers but uh actually this is my story i think you certainly have read the book and you can very well tell that uh only i would know those stories and and you're you've never lost your sense of humor it's it sprinkled all the way through the book the other thing i found about the i found very compelling about the book it's very spiritual well i grew up in a very religious family which led me to be very spiritual but i have always had a great faith in god i really think that my faith in god has been my strength and has carried me over all the hurdles that i've had to go through and i just love the the idea of god i love the the spirit of things and i love the god core and all people and the light that i uh see in people and things so i really i that is what i hold on to for my strength i'm i'm rowdy i'm playful i'm passionate and i'm full of it but i just figure i'm i am the way god made me and i feel like being true to myself and my own personality i think has been very important and i hope i don't offend anybody but i really feel like i have a great communication with god as i perceive him and that is where i find my strength all right i'm going to go for one of the questions you answer in the book that a lot of people want to know about you did you have plastic surgery well yes i have had several little things done through the years and of course we are we're a little older now than we used to be but i'm not ashamed of that at all i think it's wonderful that we have great doctors and i think god works through all people especially talented gifted people but i've had several little things done and several big ones but anyway i just really feel like you know all of you know how important it is to feel good about yourself and i in my book i tried to be as honest as i could possibly be i think it's important that you be and if i was going to get take the money that i got for writing the book i figured the least i could do is be as honest as i could could be and still be able to walk around you know but i i tried to be fair and honest not only did i talk about having plastic surgery i even gave numbers and names of people that actually are good because i think it's terrible if you're going to have something done to just get some quack or somebody that's not capable of doing it you really need to be very careful about anything you do but like i say i haven't had anything drastic done but i guess in the scheme of things you know just i don't know what else to say but yes okay all right ain't you got no gingerbread ain't you got no candy ain't you got an extra bed for me and little andy patty cake bakers man my mommy ran away again and we was all alone and didn't know what we could do i wondered if you let us stay with you oh well that's one of them sad songs i've written that may be plum pitiful as patsy sledge would say i want to go back into your childhood there's a there's a lady in the book named aunt marth and i gathered that that song was born when you met aunt marth because didn't you go to her house and say ain't you got no gingerbread absolutely tell us who aunt martha well aunt martha williams we called her marth m-a-r-t-h but her name was martha she was a lady that owned the farm that my father was living on and sharecropping when i was born we lived in a little cabin on the banks of the little pigeon river and she had a big house over from us and she was my very first memory i remember ain't marth before i even remember mom and daddy because i used to go climb up on her porch and she used to bake gingerbread and that's why that was my always my excuse to go down there is look and say ain't she got no gingerbread they always used to laugh at me saying that but she had real bad asthma she was this old lady that lived alone and she had a real hard time breathing and she used to burn some sort of brown substance in these lids that she'd sit around the house and her house had this real eerie smoke that was before electricity and in the evenings i just remember that smell and the sight and she had this big spinning wheel in her house it was like so it was sights and sounds and smells that are so impressionable to little children but she used to uh set me on her legs and trot me up and down that to uh you know and she was a song she'd say tiptoe tiptoe little dolly parton tiptoe tiptoe ain't she fine tiptoe tiptoe little dolly parton she's got a red dress she's got nine she's got a red dress she's got nine she's got a red dress just like mine and i was just so fascinated that she would know this song that had my name in it yeah of course i mean it's like i thought well you know but then like i said in the book but then i you know i felt like a special little girl because she made me special so why wouldn't there be a song with my name in it but she was precious and when she died it was like a really bad thing as i talked about in the book and some people i was little and of course i had grown a few years before she passed away but they had her in her house and these boys in the country had held me up made me touch her in the coffin and it told me all these horrible stories about this person that i dearly loved and they told me that well i don't want to go through all that stuff that's all in the book but anyhow it really gave me a horrible fear of death and i just never was able to look at dead people you know after that when they were actually when they were already dead what do you remember about january the 19th 1946 i don't remember nothing that was the day i was born the doctor got a sack of corn meal for delivering you yes my i talk in this in the in the book about the day i was born it was snowing and we lived way back in in the hills and we had this doctor that was also a uh a minister and he served his doctor he was kind of like a missionary that had been sent to the appalachian mountains and he was such a fine man but they had sent for him and my dad didn't have money to pay for him as most people in that part of the country couldn't pay with money so they'd give him canned goods and so i was paid for with a sack of corn meal and so i always said i've been raking in the dough ever since [Applause] there are some wonderful stories in this book about your mother and your daddy some uh really interesting stories about your daddy my daddy's a character but my mama is too and they're totally opposite tell tell these folks the story about the stones i thought your mother uh developed a wonderful way to handle all her kids you know the stones on the side sure i know the story in fact i believe that there is an old fable or some old story from years way way back because i'm not certain about that i just assumed that it was something my mama had you know read or something but my mother was also this very creative special person and with a house full of kids first of all there's 12 of us there's six girls and six boys and we all had lots of needs and you know yourself how hard it is for a parent to pay attention to one or two much less a houseful but mama always made no difference in any of us she seemed to love and care for us all in the same way as did my daddy but mama seemed to always sense when one of us needed more attention than the other so she used to always do things like this one particular thing she did and we still do today with the grandkids but she used to tell us to go out and find a stone we were going to make stone soup so we'd go and find the best rock that we could find the smoothest best one river rocks little river rocks were great and so she would pick out of the best rock to put in the soup that day and the soup was always so much better because it had that rock in it you know stone soup is like to this day she picked the child's rock that she felt needed the most attention yes at that moment at that moment she always knew what who that was or if some one was just feeling down or low or just needed extra attention she just always knew but mama did a lot of things like that just like my little coat of many colors that she made she knew that i needed the coat and evidently she knew that i needed that extra attention and she really made that a big deal taking all these scraps and making this coat out of coda mini out of all the scraps she used to do all these quilts make quilts for our beds and so she told me the story of joseph went through the whole thing and boy i just couldn't wait to get to school to wear that because i just knew i looked like joseph but when i got to school of course it wasn't as beautiful as mama had painted the picture and the kids all laughed at me and broke my heart and i was i was upset and mad at mama because i thought somehow she had deceived me and it was just a really bad time but mother was always like just special and she always said you know i went home and i said mama you said my coat was special you and the kid said we were poor and these were just rags and she said you we are not poor she said you'd be proud of that coat and you wear it with pride we are not poor there's a lot of people in this world a lot worse off than we are and that was true and that was her attitude so she wouldn't let me feel sorry for myself she was right about the fact kids gave you a hard time though didn't they well yeah but kids do that without meaning to all children are like that without knowing we were just extra poor kids and this was after we had moved out of the area where everybody was poor and we were going then to a school where some of the children had better clothes and had you know finer things to eat than we did to take to school but it was children don't know they're being cruel but it can really hurt i think most everybody can relate to hard times or to some embarrassing moment whether you're poor financially or not there's something about your physical self or somebody making fun or whether you know there's things going on so i think that's why people love that particular song i think they relate to it well while we are at that point in our program you actually have two books coming out yes both for harper collins tell me about this one well this little book they took the song of the code of many colors and it is a story of course and we did it and and made our first little children's book i'm going to be writing a lot of children's stories through the years and i'll be writing a series of children's books and i'll be doing tv specials and videos and albums and things for kids because i love kids and they relate to my name and to my little squeaky voice and you know everything so but i i just love kids well it's a it's a beautiful book and it also is available at your favorite bookstore yeah in addition to the they'll sell these a lot they'll use this in sunday school classes and stuff too because it really talks about you know one is only poor only if they choose to be it's kind of a philosophy and it's about parents and just the you know like you're it's not about money it's about the quality of the human being wonderful stories in this book and a lot of characters that you met along the way like sawdust oh he was amazing in fact he was one of the people that i patterned my song applejack from i had an uncle too that there was a cross between the two i had this old uncle that used to also played banjo but old sawdust was this character i think there's every everybody in every town has some some character the town uh character and he was just this old man that lived by himself up in the woods not far from us and he was just this character of the world had all these old hunting dogs he lived with these dogs and everybody used to tell all these awful stories you know about him and his dogs and he was loving on the dogs and all that stuff well he did love his dogs but it was just you know and he stunk because it's like he never baked but he didn't have to you know it's like uh he just you could go by him on the road in a car with the winds rolled up you could smell him but there was one thing we had in common and that was music after i found out that he was a musician he used to play this banjo i got to going down there boy it's like i got used to the smell and i guess he did too we didn't smell too good either but anyway he taught me a lot of things on on the banjo and he had been in the war and he taught me a lot about a world beyond the smoky mountains and how it was all right to be different too your daddy worked very hard and loved his kids didn't he oh my daddy that's one thing about the parton family they love their kids better than anything in the world especially the men i don't know if it's just an extension of themselves or just that fatherly thing but my daddy would kill anybody over one of his youngins you were sharecropping mm-hmm i guess on the first place yeah it ain't mart's place and then you he bought a place and it was really overgrown all the fences had fallen down and i guess it was a wreck it was my daddy worked really hard to get it cleaned up too and he had to dig all the stumps at himself nobody offered to help when he was working on it and this is a story they tell in our family which i've always loved and um so after sweating and heaving and hoeing over it for oh several actually a couple of years it took him to really do the fences and everything so when he finally got looking pretty good this preacher came by one day and he said boy this sure is a nice looking place you and the lord's got here lee daddy said yeah you already seen this sob when the lord had it by itself [Applause] where'd you go to high school i went to sevier county high school did you like it i hated school i hated school from the day i started till the day i graduated i just never well i was a dreamer first of all i wanted to move i wanted to get on to nashville and be a star and be on the ralph emery early morning show but i wanted to um just i just wanted to go and be with my dreams i guess and i wasn't really able to study in school because we couldn't take our books home we had work to do we had too many kids they'd tear up the books and daddy'd have to pay for them he couldn't afford it so we couldn't bring our books home so i didn't we didn't have any decent clothes to wear so in those early days i didn't get a really good start none of us did i don't think any of us like school because we had a you know we were kind of embarrassed and uncomfortable now along the way i think when you are were uh about 10 or 11 didn't you get a show business break didn't you start singing in knoxville yes i started singing on a show called the kaz walker show this this gentleman who's also another character in my life uh he owned a chain of supermarkets you're familiar with him and chet and a lot of the people that we know are born and raised in that part of the country knew him very well and he he had a competitive show they had the midday merry-go-round and then the cash walker show on the other end of town he had a tv show and a radio show that was broadcast from actually the tv show was on twice a week and the radio show was on every day so i started singing there and he would advertise his groceries and i was 10 and that was like my uncle bill had taken me down to kaz's show bill was very responsible for helping me in those early days and even coming to nashville but bill played this big red gretch guitar and he's we have it in the museum of dollywood now but that was i had my little guitar my little martin that michael lewis had given me when i was young and so i played my guitar and bill played and i that was when i the first time i was ever in front of a real live audience outside family and friends or church people and i got this big response i was 10 years old and that's when i knew for sure that this was going to be my life's work getting all that attention which i desperately needed i thought well i must be a star but i understand now that it was just because i was little but it it worked out good one more cass walker story and that's the greasy paul story oh that this there's a lot to this story in fact i that's when i was working with with kaz walker i was still a kid and after i got to be pretty famous on on the show well kaz started taking me around different places where they would also go out and do personal appearances on saturday nights well kaz in order to advertise groceries would always come up with all these gimmicks well he had what they called the greasy pole it was this big pole like a just a light pole put up in the middle of the theater that they had put there and and they greased it and then he had money at the top of the poll and every week the money would increase if you didn't if nobody reached it in a certain period of time well there was 250 dollars it had got up to and i was going to get that money you know i was pretty much still a tomboy at the time so i had i had went outside and i had wet myself down and in the creek there and i wallered around in the dirt and the grit and got myself all greedy and when it come time well i went up that pole and i got all the way to the top and got that money well no that's not but as bill carl i was saying no that's not good because i was also singing on the show a lot of people thought that i didn't deserve to have the money that it was rigged or fixed somewhere and cash got up and said how in the hell can you rig a greasy pulp he said he said if the youngin was smart enough to get out there and roll in the dirt and i didn't tell nobody they couldn't roll in the dirt she deserves the money so anyway they didn't particularly like it but i got the money and we didn't have a television i was on television before we even owned one and we had moved out and we had electricity then but we didn't have a tv and i bought our first tv with the money and all the neighbors from everywhere that didn't have tv would come to watch gun smoke i mean we would sit and watch the test pattern you know it's like at that time it would only go to midnight we'd just sit and look at that ugly indian you know and the black and white lines and all we'd even stay up sometime and watch the day you became a senior yep and they asked all the seniors what are you going to do with your life what did you say i said i'm going to go to nashville and be a star and what did they how was that how did they react well they started laughing because all the kids that had got up they were saying i'm going to carson newman college i'm going to be a doctor i'm going to be this and to me it was just as natural that's exactly what i was going to do but for some reason it was like my dream i didn't even think that there was anything wrong with that i guess it seemed like an arrogant or i don't know what i just said i was going to nashville to be a star and they all sneaked and laughed and it hurt my feelings really bad but it was a great inspiration i thought you just don't know do you i'll show you so every time i would start to you know lose heart or something i'd just think oh i've got to do it now i just have to do it now i met dolly through carl and pearl butler they came to me one day and they said and carl and pearl were really on a roll in those days they'd allowed me to get regular they were very good to me always and they they said we've got this little girl she just graduated from high school over in east tennessee and she's really good would you use her on your television show well carl pearl old friends of mine and i said sure yeah bring her out and you came out and i think you sang george jones you got to be my baby that was my biggie that was my big number that i sang on kaz walker and the first song i sung on the grand ole opry and you used to make me sing all these songs remember i used to say you is my sunshine i thought i was really singing soul music and you'd just get a big kick out of it i was embarrassing myself now i think lord i can't believe i used to sit there and sing all those crazy songs i thought you were sensational well you always treated me great and uh i'll always appreciate you for that that's why i'm always glad to get to do your show no matter where you are i think you went to the uncle bill again it took you to the grand ole opry and you and pestered people to try to get you a spot that was early on that was before we came here what was it yeah that was much earlier that was when i was about 13 12 or 13. and it was hard to get on the grand ole opry you had to be in the union you had to have someone give up their spot and jimmy c newman was nice to give up one of his spots and johnny cash was the person that introduced me that night and johnny first time i saw him that's when i really johnny was that's when he was lean and lanky and that's when i first realized what sex appeal was i was 13 years old it was like oh this is like holy moly what is this and then little did i know he'd be the first person to introduce me what did you say to johnny cash when you first met him i didn't say anything my mouth just flew open well first i had seen him on stage and i had all these feelings which now i know is just being horny [Applause] well a sex appeal or something i don't know if that's exactly the word that's what i was but i mean i don't know if that would describe what all i felt it was like he just had this great charisma and this great charm and when he came out the door we were waiting to talk to him me and my uncle we didn't we weren't too proud to say anything to anybody and so when johnny came out the door it was just like and i just was standing there staring at him and it's like well of course i make some jokes in there that some of the stuff's not good for tv but it's along the same lines all right now your uncle bill is riding with you and you wrote a song i think bill phillips recorded called put it off until tomorrow and you sang the harmony with bill and you had the song of the year in 1966 and you were just barely off the boat well that was a song we were very proud of that was the very first time we'd ever won an award my name wasn't on that record as a singer it was as a writer in that small little print underneath the song but all the dj's around the country well bill phillips first of all was the man he was on deca records at that time and he had asked if the same girl that was singing on the demo which was me we had sent this song to him he'd had a couple other hits at that time i guess not not that big you used to play you in fact you're the one one of the ones very responsible for breaking that record put it off and anyway so bill phillips said i want the same girl that's singing on that demo to sing the harmony with me i was on monument records at that time with fred foster and i've been wanting to record country music but fred was recording me rockabilly which you know he put a lot into my career had a lot of faith in me and helped me out but at that time my voice was small and he thought i'd do better doing rockabilly but i kept saying no let me do country let me do country so when this song put it off until tomorrow came out all the disc jockeys from all around the country were calling saying who is this girl on this record colin decker records and it was me and they were saying i should have a career of my own so then i went to fred and you know said they said i should sing and so he let me and that's yeah you had you had a lot of i brought in your voice on that first record happy birthday baby or something yeah well i still have a lot of that little trimly thing that i've tried i try not to to do a lot after fred saw that you know maybe i could sell country he found a song for me that curly puttman wrote called dumb blonde just because i'm blonde don't think i'm dumb because this dumb blonde ain't nobody's fool and that became my first chart record and that was in 65. and porter wagoner heard you singing dumb blonde he had seen you on my television show and he went he norma jean was leaving his show and he had to replace her and ultimately porter took you to rca and i'll get back to porter later but at rca you met a man who was not only a music executive he was one whale of a guitar player and he's here yes he's from up home and he's my friend and i love him talking about the godfather of the qatar chet atkins [Applause] hello chester welcome to the show boy am i the lucky one i won't be absolutely that anytime soon what we're gonna do we're gonna take a little break my friends and then we're gonna come back and have some fun with chet and sing and pick and that sort of thing so stay with us [Applause] chet uh do you recall how you became involved in dolly's life uh yes i do the first time i ever heard of her grant turner brought me a tape and there's a little round one of those little round tapes and plated for me and i said how old is she and so on and he said she's 11. i believe i said hell she's got to get an education that's right you may you sent me back home senator to school nice here she is he was ready you had just started i guess with rca at the time in fact you were there all those years when porter brought me there oh yeah i went varsity part of my record 57 and the next time i heard her was when the porter came office one day and we were talking us and uh i said who are you going to get to replace norma jean and he said dolly parton i said who's that because i've forgotten about nataner and he said she writes and sings for fred foster and being a competitor like i was i said well can you get a rough monument and get her on rca and he said yeah i think he can and i have guilt feelings about that now when i'm around fred oh fred forgives us yeah uh so i something got a contract now i think porter probably got you to sign i don't remember you signing in my presence did you i don't remember that either i just remember i was probably i gave it to portland i was too excited and i was pretty very appreciative of you and porter wagner but i remember uh when she had along about the time she had uh the bell monroe uh song yeah we'd sit around that table and say when is dolly parton going to be number one she's the best singer in the business and we'd say well we got to make her get rid of those wigs that shows how smart we were and she was way ahead of us chet do you recall the first time you ever performed with her ah well we made a record uh together get together and she told me she loved me on the end of she says i love you he is i love years ago we did a was that on my album or yours was your album yeah yeah i wrote the song and i remember singing with you i didn't remember if it was on my record but if we uh like i say he grew up same place i did up in east tennessee and uh we've just always had this bond between us and loved the same kind of music and uh so not long ago i had checked come down help and put a song down for me that when i did the theme song for the beverly hillbillies i had about four different songs that i sent they didn't choose this particular one we're going to do but this song that we are going to sing today at some point today is the song that's in my new album it's the the heart songs live from home that i did up at dollywood uh you picked out a song well it's in this album you picked out a song for us to perform i say us meaning i ask you to sing i have the bass line and chet doesn't think i can sing it so i'll give it my best shot oh i'm sure it'll be just fine in fact this is such a fun song maybe later on in the later in the song we might even get the audience involved but right now we'll get it set up and see he's pretty bad folks well it's supposed to be fine he's a little above below average [Laughter] well you go ahead this is called longer than always a song i wrote few years back [Music] longer than always and honest forever you true you have been my inspiration guiding light and sweetest friend i will love you longer than always [Music] longer than always [Music] [Applause] [Music] you can always [Music] now [Music] oh [Music] you want to do the dupes with me you're with us oh you're sounding good okay here we go [Music] oh that's good come on [Music] i will love [Music] it you [Applause] [Music] i can't slow down [Applause] that's fun oh that was just fun you can tell we didn't practice but it's better when you know it that's right ted have you got a problem with dolly have you got a problem yeah yeah but we can't talk about it here oh the problem there is have you heard from chet yes chad you know has sued me he sued you yeah and i keep getting to believe that yeah he did he's good for sexual harassment it's true well see this goes back a long way and i talk about this in my book you know uh porter and chet and ralph and all these great old folks from great old friends well yeah oh that's great old folks but anyway ever since i started working with porter porter told me years ago that chet was real ticklish real goosey and so i have never he never walks by me that i don't gouge him pinch him or poke him somewhere new and this is always funny so the last time i did it we were doing the uh tammy and loretta and dolly honk talk angels she wanted to be in her dressing room i was the only one to let in right in the yes in the video i didn't even get it she wanted me to be alone with me well anyway i guide you so the next week i got this letter in the mail and it's been like a running thing since then of us riding back and forth with our lawyers i'm going to sew her for 150 but he said he'd be willing to work it out and trade [Applause] but it's only a joke for those of you out there i can just see the tabloids now chad i can see his dolly parton for sexual harassment but he it's a guy i kind of wanted to do that because uh of my al i didn't want it to hurt the sales of my album read my licks so i want to get all that published listy out and say i hope this doesn't hurt the sales of my new album read my licks but i'll say it here but i'll just pinch around from now and you're not the only ass in this town [Applause] [Laughter] thank you for coming and making this such an enjoyable time i've loved this well i love her she's i'm so proud of her i wrote her a letter once so in interviews and everything she's way ahead of everybody and she's so smart and bright and beautiful and i love her like a sister i really do but i'm going to sew her maybe for a little bit later yeah [Applause] dolly i we've got a nice surprise for you we have a dear friend of yours who is in vegas and he's going to be on live with us now via satellite so please welcome kenny rogers can you see me kenny can i hear you kenny can you see you but i can hear you i can see you hello there you look pretty i i've been listening to you guys for the last 10 minutes oh and it sounds like you're having way too much fun we're playing grab ash with jet acting [Applause] sorry i'm just going to do that oh kenny how are you i'm doing great thank you how about yourself i'm terrific i wondered uh if you could if you could uh recall when you first met dolly i remember the first time i actually met her i had obviously as everyone has seen dolly around the business and i don't know when she had a television show called dolly and the word i got was that she was having trouble getting people to perform on this and i had just come from the first edition and i think had a hit of some sort and when they called me i was thrilled because you know just to be in the room with dolly is always a thrill for anyone and i i mean i know dolly i guess as well as most people do and she's such a pleasure anytime i i the thing i always say about dolly is that there's not a more consistent person in this world if you know if you like what you see you will love her when you meet her because that's what she is she was doing a television show and i came on and did a song with her and then i guess i didn't see her again for about uh five or six years and i would run into her from time to time at award shows where she was winning and i was walking by it was kind of a trend how did how did the idea of singing with dolly develop we were in the studio with barry gibb doing the islands in the stream album it was untitled at that point but we were sitting around just trying to figure who could really do that song well and it was actually barry gibbs idea to use her and it was just such an incredible i think chemistry that happened when she came in the studio uh she was simply dolly which always adds such an incredible dimension to things and the minute we started singing i think both of us and everybody in the room knew that we had stumbled into something really special do you do you two still tour together not lately but we loved it the people have always associated us even though we didn't do that many duets together people think of us as as big a duet as porter and me where it's like when you're going to be with kenny when it's like they think we've been together forever because we made such a perfect couple and i loved working with kenny and i have we had some really good times yes we did and everywhere i go consistently i was literally i was out in vegas yesterday and i was having lunch and a guy walked up to me didn't ask how i was didn't ask what was going on said where the hell is doll i said i don't know well it happens to me all the time kenny people always ask like you're attached to me now i know what to tell them dolly you're you're in nashville okay well i'm happy to see you this is great for you to stop by and say hey to us how you doing out there i'm doing great congratulations on your new book too well thank you i talked about you in it i said very nice things about you because i i meant them everywhere i didn't tell about our love affair nothing okay fine we just talked about the good stuff that's been one of the rumors no actually nobody ever really linked me and kenny together i don't believe i've ever had anybody ask if we were romantically involved and see they've asked that about the other so it was really me and kenny that were involved [Laughter] it would've been nice but we're just great friends but actually people don't uh bother us about that i think they uh just assume that it's true i think friendship friendship friendship is an amazing thing you're more than welcome ralph and i'm glad that i could be a part of this and congratulations to you dolly nobody deserves everything it's funny for me to watch you show up in different places you have so many different sides and you're so capable and gifted in all those areas and it's fun for me to just see where you're going to pop up next well i may pop up out there tonight i'll see you later i'll be here thanks kenny i love you thank you i love you thank you kenny and we'll bye-bye right back after this [Applause] i smoke but at many fast food restaurants it's not a we're on the record with dolly parton and dolly has an exciting new book fact is it's it's her first book [Music] and she wrote it herself so you can you can go to the bank on what she writes in here it's all true maybe i can go to the bank too if you buy it let's talk about the mystery man in your life a man named carl dean and dolly somehow i remember one of those mornings you did my morning television show in nashville here on channel 4. i took you back over to around 8th avenue in wedgwood where i think you had an apartment and you were going to go to the wishy-washy that day i just dropped you off and i went on home and then thing things began to take a new direction for you didn't they i met another fine good-looking man that day want to drop me off and want to pick me up that one i've kept for 30 years now that is carl dean i met him uh actually it was when i first came to nashville at the wishy-washy laundromat and i make a joke that it's been wishy-washy ever since but actually carl has been a great partner for me he's a wonderful guy people he doesn't like the limelight in fact he went with me to that very first award show the bmi that we were talking about when i won for put it up until tomorrow my uncle bill and i had written the song well carl dressed up in his tuxedo and went with me because i asked him to that night after that he said look this is your life and i wish you the best and i want you to have everything you want in this business but don't ever ask me to go to another one of these things these wing dings and so it's like i joke about in the book and i never asked him he's never been but we have a great relationship a great friendship a great love and mutual respect for one another and he's just a character i believe you stated that as long as you live he will always be your husband he will i'm sure we'll be together too one of us dies because i can't imagine you've got a picture of him yeah yeah somewhere are they showing that yeah that's pretty rare yeah this is this is from the book yeah this is a picture one of the pictures from the book and that's not a toupee that's his real hair he's got the biggest mop of hair i've ever seen in my life it's beginning to get a little gray now but uh i and to get him in a suit this was another rare occasion that's what i said the photographer came out to our house and he's got one suit that he wears to funerals and weddings and i begged him to put it on and so he we took some pictures you know and so this picture actually is about five years old well how long did you go with him before he got married two years got married may 30th 1966. you uh got married in ringgold georgia well we we got married because you you're one of the few people that knew when we were married that we had been married for for a year or so but fred foster at that time had asked me not to marry at the time that carl and i had planned to marry and uh he was your record producer he thought it might hurt your record career he did he thought it would be best to wait so we went that very weekend i said i would wait for a year we went that weekend to ringo so it wouldn't be in the tennessee papers we got our blood tests in this on the side of the road at a roadside stand you know it's like this little town that was set up for that kind of thing but i wanted to get married in a church and so they wouldn't marry us on we went on a friday and we had to wait till monday because they wanted us to get married there in the courthouse and i thought well i'll never feel like i'm married if i don't get married in church my mother had gone with us and she'd made me a little white dressed in a little veil so we came all the way back to nashville then drove back the next day and around me on monday morning and got married in the ringo georgia baptist church and neither one we just found a church there the preacher that would marry us and so that's where we got married we got a little wedding picture of that and uh so then i came back my mother was with us we were going to drop her off in chattanooga and she was going to go back to knoxville up home and then we were coming back to nashville because i was on your show that next morning and so mama left her pocky book and her snuff and so we had to go back to ringo to get it so anyway every time we got home we slept a couple hours and then you got up and and came and appeared on my television that's right and two hours of honeymoon and and then ralph [Laughter] that was my wedding present when did you finally get a honeymoon a year later we uh went to natchitoches mississippi a year later was the first chance we had because carl was working at the time he and his father ran a owned and operated a asphalt an asphalt paving company and that's where he had worked for for years and so he had work every day and i was out beating the bushes trying to get things going and so it was a year later but it actually has worked out real well we've just i don't know it's just one of those relationships that was meant to be why have you never had children well actually i can't have children now when i when i first started um my career i wasn't you know i wasn't capable or ready to have children and we had often talked about it but we didn't really know for sure i was taking birth control pills i was gaining weight and everything that i was doing was making me really feel bad and the birth control pills was causing me a lot of female problems a lot of things that i had to have medical treatment for so eventually uh i had surgery had my tubes died so i can't have kids now and then i felt really guilty and bad about that it was like i had an abortion or something although i've never been pregnant in my whole life but it's like now i can't have them i could i suppose if i was a little younger i could have had the micro surgery and had it reversed and i tried but now i'm too old and cranky let me ask you some questions about porter wagoner you spent seven years with him porter wagner took you to rca put you on his television show and he did a great deal for you yes he did i will always be grateful to porter in fact i saw him just before we started the show today he was over here doing a matinee at opryland and he's going to do some kind of special thing in february which i'll be part of but we had our hard times we had our great times we had some wonderful duets together we felt like cats and dogs but we just disagreed because you know we both had dueling dreams you know i love that phrase dueling dreams well it kind of was i wanted to go on and do a lot of things and be in the movies and be do big time television get different producers after i had been i had only agreed to stay with porter's show for five years but i stayed for seven but i kept wanting to go because i wanted my own band i didn't want to just stay part of a group although i was very grateful and will always be indebted to porter but we both you know had a lot of success because of each other but it's like there was porter just had a hard time accepting it and i wrote i will always love you about porter for porter when i left because i couldn't get him to listen to me or doing it just as simple as this i wanted to go and he wanted me to stay and we just couldn't pull it all together when you were doing the duets did he pick all the songs no we've both worked on those things always and i wrote a lot of the stuff that we did and like i say in the book i say sometimes i wonder if porter gets enough credit sometimes i wonder if he gets too much because i don't know the porter even knew that i was that much of a songwriter or that i was as serious about my career as i was at the time but i will always never deny the fact that without portal wagoner i wouldn't probably be sitting here right now it's a very touching moment in the book and i can feel your pain when you leave porter you decide to leave and you jump in a cab and you're out of his life of course i realized later on you had to resolve some other things but uh was that when you wrote i will always love you no actually i had written it during that time during the time you were battling during that time that uh we were i was trying to just i see i didn't want porter out of my life i was trying to get porter to let me get different management i wanted porter to still work with my records porter just wouldn't hear of me having anyone else come in to help manage i just wanted to have some bigger influences outside of just the country music field and i wanted porter to stay involved in my career but that was either all or nothing so it was like one of those things to where it was just everything was a threat but when i wrote i will always love you it was when i knew for sure i had to go because we had really just come up against the block wall we couldn't we couldn't even communicate we weren't getting along we weren't even being creative we were just destroying each other emotionally and so i wrote that but when i left porter there was another song after we came back to nashville after we did have to work out some stuff and i knew for sure that most of the detail stuff was over and porter wasn't fighting it anymore it was such a sad kind of a feeling that was such a sad kind of freedom it's like there i was i was free and it's like okay so now what are you going to do and i was just crying my eyes out it was raining that day and i left porter's office and it was raining all over inside and out and i started singing it's been a long dark night and i've been waiting for the morning it's been a long hard fight but i see a brand new day of dawning i've been looking for the sunshine because i ain't seen it in so long everything's going to work out just fine and everything's going to be all right it's been all wrong and i can see the light of a clear blue morning then i'll swear to you on my life just as i started into that part of the song the rain stopped and the sun came out and it was like i had it was my song of deliverance i just felt like well that's my son i know that it was time for me to go and i know that i'm i'm free and porter's free and after that he was more relieved that i was gone i'm sure because he was just tired of hearing about it what's the first birth what's the first verse of i will always love you if i should stay i would only be in your way so i'll go but i know i'll think of you each step of my way and uh you know that one part anyway it's like but actually when i wrote it was like i hope it says bittersweet memories that's all i'm taking with me goodbye please don't cry cause we both know i'm not what you need but i will always love you meaning appreciate you too and respect you and it says i hope life treats you kind and i hope you have all you ever dreamed of i wish you joy and happiness but above all this i wish you love i'm out of here bye-bye deal magnolias well still magnolias is one of the best movies that i think i've ever been part of i seem to work so well with women i love working with the men the best but my success rate is better with the women but there were so many wonderful people on that movie as you know julia roberts who became like such a spectacular star after that and olympia dukakis who i've always loved and daryl hannah and shirley maclean sally field and me and who else was in there anyway we just had a great time doing it and bobby harlan who wrote the story his sister was a big fan of mine he's the one that actually wanted me in the movie because she loved the song i will always love you she's the one who wrote the story about she's a girl that actually died in real life that julia played you know the part and i think they played i will always love you at her funeral so i wanted to do real well because he had wanted me and and for his sister but it was a great experience except you know it was tough the director herbert ross who's a great director has done some wonderful things but he's kind of tough on me and julia because he had wanted meg ryan to play the part that julia had because at that time julia wasn't that big of a star and he told me i couldn't act i said well that's no news to me you didn't hire me because i could hack you you know they hired me because i'm dolly parton and i'm a personality and if you're any kind of a director then you'll make you look like i'm active [Applause] one of the key moments in the book is the church on catons road tell me about that that old church sat down below our house had been there for hundreds a couple hundred years probably it was an old abandoned church it had an old piano that still had uh keys that worked and i used to sneak off down there and pray and it was a place where it had been abandoned people would go down there and drink there had been killings there stabbings and people would go there and make out at night and you know that kind of stuff and there were all kinds of pictures on the wall but i still found a sacred place there and i would go there to pray and to write songs and it was just a very special place to me as you can only say when you're really telling the whole story about the feeling of finding god there that's where i actually felt that i got saved as they say in our religion when i had really dedicated myself and knew what that thing was all my family everybody would go down pray in the church i was always you know i never felt that i ever made that communication with god with all those people looking at me and the boys outside looking at me and just and everybody making me pray and so that was actually in an old abandoned church is where i felt that i made my connection with god and i was baptized shortly after that you talk to him a lot don't you yeah well god is my friend and he understands me he understands all the silly stuff i do too he knows i don't mean no harm i think god would have to have a sense of humor to put up with us don't you yes but as i mentioned at the beginning of this program spirituality pervades this whole book and you you seem like you lean on him a lot there was a time when you were very depressed and you really got into an argument with him didn't you well at this particular time in my life that i go into detail of a time in my life that people have been very curious about i was down i was depressed i was sick physically i was overweight i was going through a lot of things business-wise with my family and i just felt like i'm sure i had eternal life of god but i thought he'd turn losing me and i was just angry because i couldn't get answers i was just you know in my i i just was so depressed and down that i really totally understood how people can get on drugs and alcohol or how people can commit suicide and i think there's times in everybody's life when you feel like that unfortunately a lot of people live that way day to day but i had never gone down that far to where i just felt like i was at my wit's end and i just really um had some serious conversations with god and it reminded me a great deal of that story of the footprints in the sand the two sets of footprints and saying well you know and that's when i was carrying you when i said there was only one set of footprints and that's kind of how i felt that i thought god had left me and it was just my footprints in the sand but actually i i became i came out of that a much bigger better human being you read the bible from cover to cover that took me two months but it was it was part of your therapy yes it was but i have always read the bible i know the bible very well i grew up in in the church my grandpa was a preacher and i've always been very involved in that and and work every day you know with some sort of scripture but at this particular time it was part of the therapy i thought well if i'm going to die if i'm going to kill myself i want to read the bible i want to know that i have read it from start to finish not just the new testament but i started at the old testament read all the way through the new testament and it took me a couple of months to do it but out of that started you know to become this healing and this light and this understanding that i just saw so so much about me so much more about god so much more about life and other people and it was really a very healing time and i've i've always felt like i say that i was so much better off that i had gone through that sorrow because sometimes i think we just have to be really slapped down in order to stand up and act right and maybe i just got a little too big for my spiritual breaches or something [Music] let's go for a blatant plug here okay new album is heart songs live from dollywood and uh the album i believe this is the cover it's live from home yeah yeah but it's done at dollywood at the celebrity theater and you do a lot of old very old songs mountain songs that you grew up here these are songs that i've i've been trying to do for years i wrote a lot of these songs too but they all sound old the ones that are not old sound old ones i wrote get old [Laughter] anyway that's uh but this this is something i'm very very proud of i grew up with these old songs that are from all the different worlds of music especially english irish scottish and and the welsh uh background and so they're songs that we've all loved the carter family has made a lot of them famous and like thinking tonight in my blue eyes allison krauss and uh um suzanne cox did a lot of the harmonies and uh rhonda vincent and i think allison krauss sounds like we sound so much alike that it is unbelievable in fact she's singing on my new single which is to daddy a song i wrote years ago for emmy lou harris but i never got a chance to record it myself it's going to come out and we sang so much alike on this that nobody believes that it's not me they say all that's you that's not allison krause i said it is and we sound like identical twins like the way i used to she's got that i mean i i can't sing as good as allison but our voice especially when we're doing harmonies it's just so much like my my young voice i didn't know there was a statue oh that's one of the things i'm the proudest of that's in the courthouse yard uh at our courthouse there is a statue a bronze statue that the that the county that sevier county the school kids and the people made up the money and put up so that makes it twice as special these little kids were saving their pennies and doing whatever and it's real big they don't even have a they don't have john severe in the courthouse he's the one that founded the town they just had me in the courthouse yard so i'm as proud of that thing as anything dollywood and the statue is like kind of like a tribute to my home to my family and dollywood has just meant so much to me and to the people of that area and it's like it they say you can't go home again well i say you can and we we've proved it with dollywood isn't this a response to all of the people you have tried to help in sevier county and and in your in your tennessee mountain area i know that you have been involved the dollywood foundation has paid for kids to go to college and you've given them jobs at dollywood of course you've really tried to help those people well it's been a wonderful business venture but actually uh it's more than that we get so many people we well first of all the great smoky mountains as you know is the most visited national park in the united states 10 million people every year come through the park we're beginning to get like a couple of million people coming in and out of dollywood but the thing that we're proudest of is the jobs that it's created there more hotels more restaurants more businesses have gone up since dollywood started and we just you know we have many jobs for many people and that makes me feel great but the dollywood foundation is for the education of the kids we do a lot of work for the medical needs of the county as well and the dr robert f thomas foundation who's the doctor that delivered me i do what i can for them they work very hard and do a lot of things there they have a several things at the hospital there that we you know that we work on and help with but what i'm proudest of is helping the kids the dropout rate we help the kids to study we have a hotline where if kids don't have clothes to wear if they have problems at home or they're having problems with workbooks or money you know we try to help them in every way we can to keep them in school for a person hating school is much me to try to keep others in school but i know how important it is i was going to say haven't you slowed the dropout rate in school there well it has yeah considerably we have helped a great deal but it's not just me there are many people that work very hard at the foundation but it makes me feel so proud because i think if you are in a position where you can help you should help and it ain't all about dolly parton there's a whole lot of stuff and i'm in a good position to help but it makes me feel good it makes it makes me feel like i'm giving back so much of what has been so generously given to me [Music] well um i want to be remembered as a person that worked very hard at what i did accomplished a great deal had a great deal of love for mankind did the best i could under all the conditions that i worked under and uh i just wanted to be thought i was fun and pleasurable somebody asked me he said what what do you want people to say about you 100 years from now i said i want him to say boy she looks good for her age [Music] [Applause] [Music] i i must tell you i've read this book i hardly i heartily recommend it to you [Music] you now get that straight you can sell a lot of books or nuts with great gusto i recommend it to all of you dolly parton my life and other unfinished business dolly thank you thank you i had a great time [Applause] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Sonny Graham

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Id: njaXp7EV5V8

Length: 65min 35sec (3935 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 24 2021