When Dolly Parton was young, her family often played music. She said that most of her siblings had some form of musical talent. She had a unique dedication to the art form, though. Parton’s uncle noticed her focus on honing her musical skills. Because of this, he gave her a prized gift that she hoped to hold onto for the rest of her life. Unfortunately, though, the gift burned up in a fire.
When Dolly Parton was young, she spent a good deal of time around music
Parton’s grandfather was the head of a church that often incorporated music into their worship. She also said that her mother often sang and helped influence her early talent.
“It was just natural for my mom to always be singing,” Parton wrote in the book Dolly Parton, Songteller: My Life in Lyrics. “My mother had that old-timey voice, and she used to sing all these songs that were brought over from the Old World. They were English, Irish, Welsh folk songs where people tell stories.”
She said that the early music of her childhood still influences her.
“Mama singing all those old-timey mountain songs was just embedded in my soul, in my psyche,” she wrote. “I call it my ‘Smoky Mountain DNA.’”
Dolly Parton lost a gift her uncle gave her when she was young after a fire
Though her whole family embraced music, Parton took it extremely seriously.
“Music was such a big part of our whole family,” she told Rookie Magazine. “All of my mama’s family played some sort of musical instrument. Of course, I took my music really seriously, and I was always plucking along on someone’s instrument whenever someone would come. I always love the guitar.”
When her uncle noticed how much she liked the instrument, he gifted her one.
“One of my uncles had this little Martin guitar that I loved, and when he saw how serious I was about my music, he gave me his little Martin guitar,” she said. “It was my treasure, and I left it at home when I was eighteen-years-old, I put it in the loft because it was beat up. I thought when I got money when I got rich and famous, I was going to have it fixed up.”
Unfortunately, she was never able to do this due to an accident at home. Still, she favors this kind of guitar.
“The loft burned out of our house,” she explained. “It burned up my little guitar, so I only have the neck of that one, but I’ve collected little Martin guitars all through the years, I have some classic little guitars. Especially the baby Martins.”
The singer has proved she doesn’t need an instrument to make music
Though Parton can play guitar, she has proved that she doesn’t need more than her acrylic nails to make music. She proved this on the set of 9 to 5. After she wrote the title track, she gathered the cast and crew to listen to her as she used her nails as accompaniment.
“When I got ready to record it, I brought all the women, not the men, just all the women because it was about the women in the workplace,” she told Vanity Fair. “And everybody on set, even the script girls, whoever they were, I brought them all down to the studio to sing on it with me. And I played my nails on a separate track, and it says ‘Nails by Dolly’, which I think is funny. So all through the years now, I have to play my nails.”
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