Dolly Parton Revealed Her Violent Method of Attempting to Get Out of Chores
When Dolly Parton was a child, many of her chores involved farm work. Her family lived in rural Tennessee, and her father worked as a farmer. As a result, his children helped work the fields with him. Parton said she hated this kind of labor and tried to cook up ways to get out of it. One of her methods was surprisingly violent.
Dolly Parton said she tried to avoid chores growing up
Parton is incredibly hardworking in her career as a singer, but she hated farm work. She did whatever she could to get out of it.
“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,” she wrote in her book Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business. “I would sometimes pretend to be sick, but Mama would just feel my forehead and look down my throat and send my lying butt to the fields.”
If Parton pushed hard enough, her mother would threaten to give her castor oil. Though she didn’t want to take it, she would agree in order to prove she was sick. Unfortunately, this often backfired.
“Well, that was all Mama needed to hear,” Parton wrote. “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.”
One of Dolly Parton’s attempts to avoid chores never worked
Parton said her sister, Willadeene, often got out of outdoor chores because she got nosebleeds when she overheated.
“I figured what worked for Deene could work for me, so I used to try to give myself a nosebleed,” Parton wrote. “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.”
Unlike her sister, though, Parton wasn’t prone to nosebleeds. As a result, she had to hit herself in the face to try to get one.
“I would go behind a tree where Daddy couldn’t see what I was doing, and I would hit myself in the nose as hard as I could,” she wrote. “Sometimes I came close. I got to where I could smell blood, but I never quite managed a work-stopping nosebleed.”
She later said she would never live anywhere but a farm
While Parton tried her best to avoid farm work as a child, she still has a fondness for farms. She said that she prefers living on one.
“A lot of people think that because I look so artificial, I never spend time outside,” she wrote in her book Dolly Parton, Songteller: My Life in Lyrics. “But I would never live anywhere but on a farm.”
She said that the outdoor space helped fuel her creativity.
“I love to be out in nature,” she wrote. “I have to smell the flowers. I have to touch the trees and the leaves. I sit under trees to write songs. I listen to God’s voice through the wind. I have to have that. I have to be part of that, and I am.”
Luckily for her, Parton is no longer in a position where she has to work the farm to keep it running.
