Dolly Parton is known for her generosity. In addition to being a musician of superstar proportions, she’s also famous for her philanthropic endeavors. But even the Queen of Country got up to some cruel mischief as a child. She used to pick on the chickens that lived at her family’s cabin in the mountains of East Tennessee.
Dolly Parton once said she believes every child has a little bit of meanness in them
Think back to when you were a kid. Did you ever do something mean? Maybe out of character? You might think of yourself as a perfectly kind adult. But when you’re young, the lines of ethics blur as you figure everything out.
“I believe you could take a kid and raise him in a vacuum and never show him anything but kindness, and there is still a certain kind of devilment that is going to enter that kid’s mind,” Parton wrote in her first memoir, Dolly Parton: My Life and Other Unfinished Business. “Of course that theory could never be tested because it would be unkind to raise a kid in a vacuum in the first place. That sort of inevitable meanness must have been what led me to torment the chickens that ran in our yard.”
Dolly Parton would pick on the chickens that ran under her family’s cabin
The floorboards of the Parton cabin were spaced so far apart that you could see the family’s chickens below through the cracks. You could even drop down some food scraps for them to eat. But young Dolly did more than just feed the chickens.
“I figured that if the chickens could be lured into pecking up through the cracks, a little girl with quick fingers could grab them by the beaks and hold them above the ground for a few seconds, causing them to thrash about and bear their wings as if they had been set upon by the devil himself,” she wrote. “This plan was successfully carried out enough times to give every chicken in the yard a sore beak and a wisdom about sticking her nose into cracks.”
To make herself feel better about it, the “Coat of Many Colors” singer would reason that this cruel act somehow prepared the chickens “for the future.”
Read Related Also: What Is Dolly Parton’s ‘World on Fire’ Really About?—a Closer Look at the Song Next to the Singer’s Politics
“It is that same kind of childlike innocence that creates such an excuse for devilment that also chooses to believe a chicken has much of a future in the first place,” she wrote.
The favorite family chicken
Despite the trick she’d play on the chickens, Parton and her siblings had a favorite bird. Her name was Penny. And everybody tried to ignore the fact that Penny would someday end up on the dinner table.
“This scraggly-looking red hen could only be described as goofy,” she wrote. “If she had been a human being, she definitely would have been institutionalized.”
Penny had a habit of snatching up anything and everything the humans dropped and running for the hills with it in her beak—”she would run with it all day long, and nobody could stop her.”
But for every item Penny took, she gave the Parton family double the laughs in return.
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