No one can say that Dolly Parton isn’t a hard worker. She’s such a hard worker, in fact, that it seems like she never stops working. Whether she’s making an appearance at Dollywood, performing, or coming out with a line of baked goods, Parton is always up to something. But when the “Coat of Many Colors” singer was a young girl growing up in the mountains of East Tennessee, it wasn’t unusual for her to try and get out of work (with the use of fake ailments). And there was a lot of work to be done.
Dolly Parton hated working in the fields
The Parton family did a lot of farming. It was how they ate and how they made money. With 12 Parton kids running around, the children were expected to help when they were old enough to do so. Parton, particularly, hated the chore.
“The truth is I hated to work in the fields,” she wrote in her first biography Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business. “I don’t know if it was out of dread of physical work itself or because the work took me away from my songwriting and dreaming, but I would do anything to try to get out of it.”
‘I would sometimes pretend to be sick’
Parton would sometimes “pretend to be sick” to get out of farm work. But her mother, Avie Lee, would always feel her forehead and look down her throat to see if she was lying. If Parton looked alright, Avie Lee would “send my lying butt to the fields.”
Sometimes, though, Parton would insist that she really was sick. So her mother had another trick to see if her daughter was faking or not.
“She would threaten me with castor oil,” wrote Parton. “But I would rather have put up with a few moments of absolute hell than suffer all day long. So, I would agree to take it. Well, that was all Mama needed to hear. 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.”
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Dolly Parton’s nosebleed attempts
One of Parton’s sisters, Willadeene, got out of working in the fields because she had nosebleeds—if she got too hot, she’d start to bleed. So she was assigned work inside the home. That gave the “Don’t Make Me Have to Come Down There” singer an idea.
“I figured what worked for Deene could work for me, so I used to try to give myself a nosebleed,” wrote Parton. “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. Once I got back to the house, I could write songs, or sing songs, or sing about songs, and most of all get on with my all-important dreaming.”
So Parton would go behind a tree where no one could see her and hit herself in the nose as hard as she could. She never could get a good stream going.
“Sometimes I came close,” she wrote. “I got to where I could smell blood, but I never quite managed a work-stopping nosebleed.”
Though Parton very rarely got out of work, that didn’t stop her daydreaming.
“In the midst of the direst poverty and despair, the human spirit, especially that of children, will find some hope to cling to, some promise of a better day,” she wrote.
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