Dolly Parton’s fans have practically never seen her out of her wigs. She decided to start wearing them long ago and has never looked back. While she likes the convenience and wide range of styles they afford her, not everyone around her has been a fan. Her record label, RCA, would have meetings about how to get her to stop wearing them.

Dolly Parton’s record label did not like her wigs

In the early 1970s, Parton’s relationship with Porter Wagoner was nearing its end. She worried about the effect of his controlling nature on her career. Perhaps sensing her dissatisfaction, Wagoner reached out to RCA, their record label, to push them to do more to promote her as an artist.

RCA, however, was not concerned with promotional efforts. Instead, they were having frantic meetings about Parton’s appearance. Chet Atkins, who worked for the label, said people desperately wanted her to stop wearing wigs. 

“We’ve got to stop Dolly Parton from wearing those terrible wigs,” Atkins recalled people saying, per the book Smart Blonde by Stephen Miller. “She looks like a hooker.”

Their efforts failed. Parton still wears wigs to this day.

Dolly Parton explained why she wears her wigs

Parton likes to wear her hair bigger and blonder than its natural state. The years of bleaching and teasing began to cause significant damage, and she decided to take a different approach.

“I thought, ‘Why am I going through all that? Why not just wear wigs?’” she told Hallmark’s Home and Family. “That way I never have a bad hair day. I have a big hair day, but not a bad hair day.”

While her natural hair couldn’t reach the same heights, it is the same color as the wigs.

“I keep my hair the same color. I keep my roots up for my husband,” she explained, adding, “I don’t want to look good for everybody else and then go home and look terrible. I try to keep my own hair the same length, just a little below the shoulder.”

She said she modeled her look after ‘the town tramp’

Parton’s blonde, towering hair and skin-tight clothing have been a part of her signature look for years. She said she got the inspiration from a woman in her hometown.

“I really patterned my look after the town tramp in our hometown, the trollop,” she said on The Oprah Conversation. “The one that would kind of walk up and down the streets, get in a car, ride off for a few minutes, come back and get in another car.”

While some people judged the woman, Parton wanted to look just like her.

“I didn’t know anything about that part then,” Parton said. “I just knew she was beautiful. She had all this beautiful blonde hair, red lipstick and makeup, tight short skirts and high heel shoes. I just thought she was the prettiest thing I’d ever seen so I kind of patterned my look after that. I always loved the Frederick’s of Hollywood magazines. That was just kind of to me how I felt, like I wanted to look.”