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As a young girl growing up in the rural landscapes of Tennessee, Dolly Parton was no stranger to the demands of farm life. Born into a farming family, her father relied on his children to help till the fields. However, Parton harbored a strong dislike for this kind of work and often devised creative, albeit drastic, tactics to avoid it.
Dolly Parton said she tried to avoid chores growing up
Though renowned for her tireless dedication in the music industry, Parton’s industrious nature didn’t extend to the fields. She consistently sought ways to evade farm chores.
In her autobiography, Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business, Parton candidly reflected, “Whether it was the physical labor itself or the distraction from my songwriting and dreaming, I was willing to do nearly anything to avoid it. I’d sometimes feign illness, only for Mama to check my temperature and inspect my throat before sending me right back to work.”
Desperate to escape, Parton sometimes pushed her mother to the point of threatening her with castor oil—a remedy she dreaded. Despite her aversion, she would agree to take it to convince her mother of her supposed sickness, a plan that often did not go as intended.
“That was all Mama needed,” Parton noted. “If I was prepared to take castor oil, it was a clear giveaway that I was faking. If I were genuinely ill, I would have resisted that spoon as if it were the devil himself.”
“Well, that was all Mama needed to hear,” Parton wrote. “If I was willing to take castor oil, I had to be lying about being sick. If I was really sick, I would fight that spoon as if it were the devil himself.”
One of Dolly Parton’s attempts to avoid chores never worked
Parton said her sister, Willadeene, often got out of outdoor chores because she got nosebleeds when she overheated.
“I figured what worked for Deene could work for me, so I used to try to give myself a nosebleed,” Parton wrote. “A nosebleed would be perfect. It would be graphic and horrifying, all that red blood streaming down my face. It was sure to bring out the ‘poor child’ reaction and get me a one-way ticket back to the house.”
Unlike her sister, though, Parton wasn’t prone to nosebleeds. As a result, she had to hit herself in the face to try to get one.
“I would go behind a tree where Daddy couldn’t see what I was doing, and I would hit myself in the nose as hard as I could,” she wrote. “Sometimes I came close. I got to where I could smell blood, but I never quite managed a work-stopping nosebleed.”
She later said she would never live anywhere but a farm
While Parton tried her best to avoid farm work as a child, she still has a fondness for farms. She said that she prefers living on one.
“A lot of people think that because I look so artificial, I never spend time outside,” she wrote in her book Dolly Parton, Songteller: My Life in Lyrics. “But I would never live anywhere but on a farm.”
She said that the outdoor space helped fuel her creativity.
“I love to be out in nature,” she wrote. “I have to smell the flowers. I have to touch the trees and the leaves. I sit under trees to write songs. I listen to God’s voice through the wind. I have to have that. I have to be part of that, and I am.”
Luckily for her, Parton is no longer in a position where she has to work the farm to keep it running.
