Dolly Parton Was So Broke When She First Got To Nashville, She Would Walk Into Hotels & Swipe Leftover Room Service To Eat

Bunnie Xo/Dumb Blonde Podcast

Doing what she had to do to get by.

Dolly Parton is obviously an icon, but she came from very humble beginnings, growing up very poor (well, money-wise), in the mountains of east Tennessee. Dolly had with 11 brothers and sisters, and she always notes how much love they had in their family, even if everybody in their area was poor with three o’s.

She moved to Nashville as soon as she graduated high school, and not long after that, she landed a publishing deal with Tree Publishing Company which did give her a small salary to live on.

But still, she had no car, no phone, and was doing her very best to get by as a young woman in Nashville, and she told BunnieXO during an episode of her Dumb Blonde podcast not too long ago that many of the session musicians she worked with were always eager to give her a ride home.

She joked that they would often buy her dinner, too, and maybe expect something else…

“Well I was lucky because there are so many songwriters in Nashville, and publishing companies ,and a lot of the people that write songs are not good singers. So all the publishing companies, they hire if there’s female songs, that you can get a job singing those songs. So I got work through Tree Publishing Company, Buddy Killen was a dear friend, and so he would get me on these session singing some of these songs that these writers had written, singing the girl songs.

And then I didn’t have a car, I didn’t have a phone, I didn’t have anything. and so all these musicians, because I was a right pretty girl at that time, just a young girl, and so I had all these musicians that were on the session always willing to drive me home. Always willing to stop and buy me a burger, and some of them thinking they might get more, and some of them might have…

Seriously, they were always so good to me. Everybody seemed to know that my heart was in a good place and I was just a country girl. I was funny, you know, I was always cracking jokes or just being like I am now, really. But everybody got a kick out of me, so I was just one of the boys, because I had six brothers and all my uncles and my grandpa. I was not a bit shy around the men, and I knew how to maneuver with all that.

So I made money, and then I also got on a small salary with Tree Publishing Company in those early days. And then later, I got with Combine Music with Fred Foster at Monument Records, they had a publishing company. I always lucky that I always got a little bit of a salary as a writer of my own songs, in addition to being able to sing some of the demos.”

Classic Dolly… and look what she’s built from that. It’s beyond impressive.

But even though she had plenty of suiters who were happy to buy her dinner, some days, she would walk through Nashville hotels and take food from the room service trays, along with the extra condiments that came with the meal when people were finished. She also got dinners from a local meat and three in exchange for filling up their salt and pepper shakers and things like that:

“Well, I used to go, in the early, early days, I would walk down to the hotels and I would walk through the hallways, and I would see all the trays out on the front of the doors, and any food that, you know, like all those little mustard and ketchup packets and bottles, I’d take those all back and anything that looked like it was pretty decent to still eat, I would get it.

I would just get a napkin off of the tray and put it all in my purse. And there was a restaurant down around 12th Avenue at that time, it was called Cousers, it became very famous. It was meat and three, and the Couser brothers owned it. And I would walk down there, and they liked me, and so they would give me free food.

They would give me a good meal, but I would clean off the tables and I would refill the salt and pepper shakes and I would do all the things that you do like that, so I would do that, I didn’t get it for money, but I got good food and then they pack me stuff to take home too.”

It’s hard to even imagine the Dolly we know and love today doing anything like that, but she had a dream and the desire to see it through, and obviously was willing more than most people to do whatever it took to achieve that.

We all know what an impressive woman Dolly is, and every time I hear a new story from here I’m reminded all over again why that’s the case.