Dolly Parton was truly one of one.
The “Queen of Country,” who died on Aug. 25 at age 80, will be remembered not only for the timeless music but also for gracing the world with her authentic, enchanting personality.
Her fearless attitude and quick wit were on full display in her 1977 interview with the late Barbara Walters, where Parton held her own against the journalist’s pointed questions.
In the televised interview, which was conducted in December 1977 and broadcast in 1978, Walters asked the “Jolene” singer, “Dolly, where I come from, would I have called you a hillbilly?”
“If you had have, it would have been something very natural, but I would have probably kicked your shins or something,” Parton replied to Walters, who died in 2022 at age 93.
Walters doubled down, asking, “But when I think of hillbillies, am I thinking of your kind of people?”
Parton acknowledged that Walters might think of the people she grew up with as “Li’l Abner people,” referring to the stereotypical rural Appalachian characters depicted in the popular comic strip, but made clear she took pride in her roots.
“But we were very proud people, people with a lot of class. It was country class, but it was a great deal of class. And most of my people were not that educated, but they are very, very intelligent. Good common sense, horse sense, we called it,” she said.
Dolly Parton’s shared ‘fairytale’ of her life
Parton’s charm notably shined when Walters suggested the musician lived in a world of fantasy and asked her to describe her life as a fairy tale.
“I want to try a fairy tale on you. Once upon a time, there was a little girl. Her name was Dolly Parton and,” Walters said, leaving Parton to fill in the blank.
“She lived in a small town in the mountains, which she loved because it was a comfort because she knew there was love and security there in her family,” Parton replied.
Continuing her story, Parton said the child was very curious and wanted all the things she had long been impressed by from the “fairy tales of the Mother Goose stories” to “the Cinderellas and the lost slipper.”
“Well, I guess she kind of wanted to find the other slipper in sort of a way. So she worked hard and she dreamed a lot and one day it came true. She was a fairy princess and she lived happily ever after.”
Dolly Parton reflects on her Barbara Walters interview
The Grammy-winner reflected on the interview more than a decade later in her 1994 memoir, “Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business,” where she revealed that people told her the interview was a bad idea.
“A lot of people warned, ‘Oh, you’re crazy to do that! She’ll chew you up and spit you out,” she wrote, before denying those claims about Walters. “Nothing could have been further from the truth.”
“Barbara is a very insightful person. Once she realized I was real, that my insides weren’t as phony as my outsides, she got completely into it,” Parton wrote.
The country music legend would return for another interview in 1982, when Walters joined her in visiting Parton’s home on the outskirts of Nashville.