THE PLAYBOY INTERVIEW
INTERVIEW BY LAWRENCE GROBEL
OCTOBER 1, 1978

PARTON: Hi. I’ll save you the trouble of askin’: Why do I choose to look so outrageous?

PLAYBOY: Okay. Now, why do you choose to look so outrageous?
PARTON: People have thought I’d be a lot further along in this business if I dressed more stylish and didn’t wear all this gaudy getup. Record companies have tried to change me. I just refused. If I am going to look like this, I must have had a reason. It’s this: If I can’t make it on my talent, then I don’t want to do it. I have to look the way I choose to look, and this is what I’ve chose. It makes me different a little bit, and ain’t that what we all want to do: be a little different? It’s fun for me. It’s like a little kid playing with her paints and colors. I like to sit and tease my hair. If there’s something new on the market in make-up, I like to try it. You’ve got to have a gimmick. You’ve got to have something that will catch the eye and hold the attention of the public. But the funny thing is, no matter how much I try new staff, I wind up looking just the same.

People will always talk and make jokes about my bosoms. But why dwell on that? Why don’t they look underneath the breasts, at the heart.

PLAYBOY: All right. How would you describe yourself to someone who had never seen or heard you?
PARTON: Well, I would start by saying that I pride myself on being a fair and honest person. I am free and open enough to be able to try new things. I’m outrageous. I feel like I have a lot of depth that only the people closest to me really see. I’m compulsive and very ambitious. I’m playful. I’m joyful. I’m mischievous. Serious when I mean to be serious. I can be strong when I need to be and weak when I want to be. I can tell you where to put it if I don’t like where you got it. I’m not a very moody person. I don’t fall into great states of depression. Very sentimental and highly emotional. I’m a baby when it comes to bein’ a baby. I like to be spoiled and petted. I get touched real easy. I’m curious, I have to know everything that goes on. I’m not a brilliant person, but I have a lot of guts. I just don’t have a fear of life. I love life, so why should I fear somethin’ I love? And why should I not reach out to the things that I know I can touch? I’m strong-willed. I can think like a workingman because I know what a workingman goes through. I’m a person you could sit down with even if you were a total stranger and tell me the thing you thought was the most horrible thing and I would understand it. And I wouldn’t tell. I’m a good friend. I’m loyal and devoted to the things that I believe in…. I’m full of shit!

PLAYBOY: That’s quite a description. Now, how would you assess your talent?
PARTON: I like to be appreciated as a writer and, if not a great singer, at least a stylist and an original, creative person. 

PLAYBOY: You don’t feel you’re that good a singer?
PARTON: I don’t think so. My manager just hates me to say that, because he says it’s not true. I don’t have a great voice. I have a different voice and I can do things with it that a lot of people can’t. But it’s so delicate in other ways, there’s no way I can do some of the things other singers can.

I just love to sing. It is joyful, it’s something I can scream, it’s a release for me. I used to have a lot of vibrato in my voice. It could almost be real irritating to a lot of people’s ears. It was a natural thing for me, but some people say, "You sound like you been eating billy goat." Bah, bah. I guess I overdone it, so I tried to learn at takin’ some of the vibrato out. I would like to improve my voice to be able to hit better notes. My notes are not always true. But my heart is always true. And the emotion I put in is always true.

PLAYBOY: Do you listen to yourself often?
PARTON: No, never. Unless I’m in the studio tryin’ to decide what goes in the album. I’m not necessarily a fan of my own. I’m not one of my favorite singers.

PLAYBOY: Have you had any difficulties getting your fans to accept your new image? Are there diehard country-music buffs who can’t accept your crossing over into the pop/rock field?
PARTON: We had some of that when I started, when I first got the bigger band and started doin’ more rocky things. Some people hollered, “Do your country, we don’t need your rock ’n’ roll." I don’t do rock ’n’ roll. I knew what I was tryin’ to do and I didn’t have time to try to explain it to them.

I have not changed because of success, and I never will. The only thing success does to you, like Barbra Streisand said in her Playboy Interview, it just don’t allow you to be alone anymore. Everybody is tryin’ to get to you. It just gets to the point where people demand so much from you you just can’t give it and you have to take all kinds of hurts and insults. It bothers you. Of all things, for somebody to say that I’ve changed, that just burns me up.

PLAYBOY: Are you close to most of your band members?
PARTON: I’m close to all the people in my band. I’m not above them just because I am the star. They are not sidemen to me. We are all musicians making a living for each other. The way we travel, I couldn’t work with a bunch of loonies, a bunch of squirrels. I don’t mind drugs, I don’t mind drinkin’ in my group as long as it don’t interfere with my show. We’re together 24 hours a day, but that one hour onstage is mine. That’s what I pay for. I don’t care what you do after the show, I don’t care what you do until four or five hours before the show. As long as everybody is straight, so if I want communication when we’re onstage, I have it.

PLAYBOY: And you feel you’re close to that now?
PARTON: My group is pretty clean. See, I live with the band. I travel with ’em, I don’t like to separate myself from my group. In summertime, we take our barbecue grill and travel by bus. We only fly when we have to. Rather than stopping at a truck stop or a restaurant, we get a volleyball net, out, we stop along the side of the road and have a picnic. I cook, there’s another girl in my group, we have a real good time. We have water fights, cake fights, food fights … like brats. It’s like a family. When the clay comes when I can’t enjoy it or there’s no fun doin’ it, there’s lots of things that I can find joy in, and I would.

PLAYBOY: Did you like school?
PARTON: I hated it. Even to this day, when I see a school bus, it’s just depressing to me. I think, Those poor little kids having to sit there in the summer days, staring out the window. It’s hot and sweaty in the schoolroom. It reminds me of every feelin’ and every emotion that I had in school. I’d hate to have to make my own kids go to school. I know that sounds terrible. A lot of people will say, "What a dumb person." I hated school every day I went, but it was better than stayin’ home every day. Momma was sick a lot; we had some real hard times.

PLAYBOY: Did you have a lot of childhood fantasies?
PARTON: We didn’t have television and we didn’t have radio. We didn’t have electricity. Every now and then, if we could afford a battery—we had a battery radio—we’d listen to The Grand Ole Opry and The Lone Ranger maybe once or twice a week.

But we’d see catalogs—the wishbook, Momma called it. Made you wish you had things you didn’t have. I wanted fancy clothes, I wanted jewelry, I wanted to be pretty.

We related to the Bible a lot, lots of stories we played out were from the Bible. We were Disciples and we would paint on our feet these sandals, and then we found these staffs and we just roamed those hills as shepherds. We played out Jacob and Joseph and the coat of many colors. I wrote a song once … my favorite story was the coat of many colors.

So that was kind of a fantasy we lived in. We didn’t have books to read, except at school, and we tried not to read those.

PLAYBOY: Did you see magazines or newspapers at all?
PARTON: We’d hear about war stories and about famous people, movie stars. Sometimes my aunt in Knoxville would bring newspapers up, which we used for toilet paper. But before we used it, we’d look at the pictures. And we’d hear about people who would get rich and you’d have all the food you wanted to eat and fancy clothes and houses. In our minds, there was so many of us, anybody that had a clean house was rich.

PLAYBOY: Well, you seem to have had a healthy childhood. Did you share your dreams of being a star with your parents?
PARTON: Yeah. I started writing songs before I went to school. Momma always wrote down stuff that I’d make up. I just had a gift of writing. I’d hear my people talk about relatives’ bein’ killed and I would make up all these heartbreakin’ songs about it. They’d forget they’d talked about it and they couldn’t imagine where I would come up with all these ideas. I just knew how to put it into story form. And Momma would write them down.

PLAYBOY: When did you start singing on the radio?
PARTON: I had an uncle that told me there was this radio show in Knoxville and that sometime he might take me down there and I might get to be on it. I wanted to do that. So, when I was 10 years old, I sung on the radio. And they all liked me real good, so they wanted me to work in the summer months. They said they’d pay me $20 a week. My aunt in Knoxville said she would take me up to the radio stations and the TV shows if Momma and Daddy would let me stay, and she did. I worked there in the summers until I was 18. I went from $20 a week to $60 when I left.

PLAYBOY: What kinds of songs were you singing?
PARTON: I sung country music, some songs I wrote. I was singing by myself and playing the guitar. But I guess it was because I was a little kid they were sayin’ people liked it. I wasn’t that good.

PLAYBOY: Were any of your songs recorded then?
PARTON: I made my first record when I was around 11.

PLAYBOY: And when did you make your first appearance at the Opry?
PARTON: I was just a kid, 12 or 13. My uncle told the man at the Grand Ole Opry that I wanted to be on. The man said, “You can’t be on the Grand Ole Opry, you are not in the union.” And I said, “What is a union?” I didn’t know if it was a costume or a room to practice or what. I kept tellin’ everybody. I said I’ll just sing one song. Most of the artists at the Opry at that time had two spots. Nobody would let me sing and I walked up to Jimmy C. Newman, who was goin’ to sing next, and told him I wanted to be on. He told Johnny Cash that I was goin’ to sing. And so Johnny Cash brought me out and I sung and I just tore the house down. I had to sing it over and over and over. I thought I was a star. That was my first time.

PLAYBOY: Were you always encouraged to be whatever you wanted to be?PARTON: Where I came from, people never dreamed of venturing out. They just lived and died there. Grew up with families and a few of them went to Detroit and Ohio to work in the graveyards and the car factories. But I’m talkin’ about venturing out into areas that we didn’t understand. To me, a little kid coming from where I did and having that ambition and sayin’ I wanted to be a star, people would say “Well, it’s good to daydream, but don’t get carried away.” People would say you can’t do this or you can’t become this. Well, if you don’t think you will do it, nobody else will think it.

I’ve got more confidence than I do talent, I think. I think confidence is the main achiever of success, I really do. Just believin’ you can do it. You can imagine it to the point where it can become reality. When I made my change to do what I’m doin’ now to appeal to a broader audience, people said, “You can’t do that, because you are goin’ to wreck your whole career; you are goin’ to lose your country fans and you’re not goin’ to win the others, and then you’re goin’ to have nothin’. You just better think about that, girl.” That didn’t matter to me, because I knew I had to do it and I knew I could do it.

PLAYBOY: What other kinds of things could you do as an entertainer?PARTON: I don’t think there’s anything I can’t do. Under the right conditions, I could just about do anything. Even a Broadway play, if it was a mountain musical where I didn’t have to be a Streisand-type singer or have a beautiful trained voice. If it was somethin’ written just for me, I think I could do anything. Most people don’t have that kind of confidence in themselves.

PLAYBOY: Are you more prolific as a songwriter than most?
PARTON: Yes. It’s just a natural gift. I like to write and I write all the time. I’ve written less in the last year and a half, but even at that, I’ve written more than most writers do. It’s just so easy. I’ve got hundreds and hundreds of songs, thousands, actually. I’ve had a few hundred published and recorded. The good thing about it is this: I’ve been writin’ all these years, if I never wrote another song, I’ve got it made. People are goin’ back now and gettin’ songs of mine and recordin’ them, things I did on albums years ago. Of course, I still will write. It’s like most people will sit clown and smoke a pipe, I just sit down and pick up a piece of paper….

PLAYBOY: Do you write in longhand?
PARTON: Yeah, I scribble; nobody can read it but me, hardly. I write on torn paper, Kleenex boxes, napkins. I wrote “Coat of Many Colors” on the bus. It’s my most famous song. I was with Porter and he had some clothes cleaned and I took the tickets off of his cleanin’ bags and wrote the song on them. After the song became a hit, he had the tickets framed.

PLAYBOY: What’s the biggest song that you’ve had recorded?
PARTON: “Jolene” was the biggest hit I’ve had. It was also recorded by Olivia Newton-John. I also had a song called “I Will Always Love You,” which Linda Ronstadt recorded. I’ve had tons of songs and albums recorded by other people. But I’ve yet to have that big, smash, million-selling song of my own. I’ve had lots of number-one songs, but when you get involved in how much they sell, it’s rare to get a million seller.

PLAYBOY: Is most of what you write autobiographical?
PARTON: Everything I write is not about me. You have to be able to relate to the things you write about, but you don’t have to live them personally.

PLAYBOY: Will you shock a lot of people?
PARTON: Yeah; that’s why I ain’t puttin’ them out today or the day after tomorrow. When I decide to publish some of my books, I’m goin’ to write in the front that those who think they might be offended, don’t read them. Then, if you are offended, don’t blame me, because now I’m not just a singer but also a writer; and as a writer, I have to have freedom of total expression.

PLAYBOY: Would you use a pseudonym?
PARTON: I want to do everythin’ under my own name, ’cause when I go down in history, I want to go down good and solid.

PLAYBOY: They could put that on your tombstone: Good and solid.
PARTON: I don’t want a tombstone. I want to live forever. They say a dreamer lives forever…. I want to be more than just an ordinary star. I want to be a famous writer, a famous singer, a famous entertainer; I want to be a movie writer; I want to do music movies, do children’s stories; I want to be somebody important in time; I want to be somebody that left somethin’ good behind for somebody else to enjoy.

Everybody wants to be successful at whatever their inner dream is. I’m not near with what I want to do, with what I want to accomplish. When I feel like I have accomplished the things that I want to accomplish, then maybe I will personally think of myself as a superstar. I want to be somebody that extremely shines. A star shines, of course, but I want to be really radiant.