Dolly Parton Was Miserable at a Party Thrown by Linda Ronstadt
Dolly Parton and Linda Ronstadt may have collaborated on two albums, but the former wasn’t sure she fit in with Ronstadt’s friend group. Parton has been involved with the music industry since she was a child and rose to major fame in adulthood. Still, she didn’t feel that she fit in with a crowd at Ronstadt’s house.
Dolly Parton didn’t feel she fit in at Linda Ronstadt’s party
By the end of the 1970s, Parton, who had solidly established herself in the country music scene, crossed over to mainstream success. Through all of this, she maintained a shimmering vitality and sincerity. As she achieved increasing levels of fame, she stayed true to her roots. For this reason, she became slightly uncomfortable when surrounded by other celebrities.
“I can tell you one thing,” her guitarist Don Roth said in the book Dolly by Alanna Nash. “If she seemed snooty, it’s because she was scared. Because she’s scared of big city people and New York, to begin with. But if there’s one thing Dolly ain’t, it’s snooty. She’s open and funny — until she gets in a situation that she can’t handle, and then she goes into the shell a little bit.”
Roth said that Parton struggled through parties thrown by Ronstadt. Major artists were often in attendance and she didn’t feel she fit in with them.
“She’s often said when she goes to a party at Ronstadt’s house, she just wants to get out of there as soon as possible,” he said. “Everybody was saying to her for a long time, ‘Isn’t that great? You’ll go to Linda’s party and meet a Rolling Stone and all these people will be there …’ But she said, ‘I’d really rather not. I like Linda and all, but boy, I’m sure not into her crowd.’”
She once said she’d never move to a city like Los Angeles
Parton, who grew up in rural Tennessee, loved traveling to cities like New York and Los Angeles. She didn’t think she could ever live in them, though. She still saw herself as a country girl.
“There is not a lick of danger of me doing that,” she said when asked if she’d move to Beverly Hills. “I would never move there. I love to go there. It’s excitin’ for me, just like New York is. Why, I could sit there on the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and watch those freaks forever … Nobody is going to change me or ruin me. I am as stubborn as a mule. I have my own idea about who I am, and what I am, and I am very happy and content with that …”
Despite this, Parton would eventually live in both New York and LA. She maintained an address in Tennessee through this, though.
Dolly Parton and Linda Ronstadt would later work together on an album
While Parton did not particularly enjoy herself at Ronstadt’s parties, she liked the other artist. They sang together with Emmylou Harris on Parton’s short-lived variety show and would go on to record two albums as a group.
“The way that Emmylou Harris, Linda Ronstadt, and I had blended so beautifully on that little local show made it seem obvious to me that the three of us should do an album together,” she wrote in her book Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business. “We all thought so and tried to coordinate everything to do just that, several years before the Trio album actually happened, but it didn’t work out at that time.”
The group released Trio in 1987 and Trio II in 1999.
