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While Dolly Parton doesn’t have a child of her own, she has an idea of what she would have been like as a mother. She helped raise a number of her younger siblings and her nieces and nephews. She has also taken some younger musicians under her wing. Parton said she had a particularly strong bond with one singer and imagined her own child would be very similar to her.

Dolly Parton believed her child would be like one country singer

In 1991, Parton worked with a then-20-year-old Alison Krauss on the song “If You Need Me.” Though Krauss was only at the start of her career, she felt she had peaked.

“Nothing will ever top getting to sing with Dolly Parton,” she said, per the book Smart Blonde by Stephen Miller. “Now I can die.”

Parton also enjoyed working with Krauss. She saw herself in the younger singer and believed that if she had a daughter, she would be like Krauss.

“I just claimed her,” Parton said. “It was like she was my little soul mate; like if I’d have had a child, it would probably have been like Alison.”

Dolly Parton admitted her experiences as a child made her not want children

Parton and her husband, Carl Dean, planned on having children early in their marriage. Before she met him, though, Parton said she didn’t want to settle down and start a family. She already had a taste of raising kids during her childhood.

“I hadn’t intended to marry,” she said, per the book Dolly: The Biography by Alanna Nash. “All I had ever known was housework and kids and workin’ in the fields. But I didn’t want to be domestic; I wanted to be free.”

She didn’t want anything to pull her away from her burgeoning career as a singer.

“I had my songs to sing. I had an ambition, and it burned inside me,” she said. “It was something I knew would take me out of the mountains. I knew I could see worlds beyond the Smoky Mountains.”

Part of the reason her relationship with Dean worked so well was that he always supported her career.

Parton thinks she would have been a good mother, but doesn’t have regrets

In early interviews, Parton discussed her hopes of raising a brood of children with Dean. They even had a name picked out for a daughter.

“We thought about if we had kids, what would they look like? Would they be tall — because [Carl Dean is] tall? Or would they be little squats like me?” she told The Guardian in 2014. “If we had a girl, she was gonna be called Carla … Anyway, we talked about it, and dreamed it, but it wasn’t meant to be.”

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Parton said she has no regrets about not having kids. She is still an important figure in the lives of her nieces and nephews, and she never had to feel torn between her ambition and her family. 

“Now that we’re older? We’re glad,” she said. “I would have been a great mother, I think. I would probably have given up everything else. Because I would’ve felt guilty about that if I’d have left them. Everything would have changed. I wouldn’t have been a star.”

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