Dolly Parton Said Her High School Graduation Hurt Her ‘Really Bad’
Dolly Parton didn’t like school, and her experience at her high school graduation was an unfortunate ending to her years in the classroom. Parton and her classmates shared their plans for the future. She said that their response to her dreams hurt her feelings badly.
Dolly Parton said her high school graduation was a painful experience
Parton has known that she wanted to be a star since childhood. When asked about her post-high school dreams, she told her classmates her plan. It didn’t go over well for her.
“When we were graduating, (high school classmates) were making little speeches and saying, ‘Well, I’m going to nursing school, I’m going to join the service, I’m going to get married,’” Parton told USA Today. “When I got up, I said, ‘I’m going to Nashville to be a star.’ There was a lot of laughter, and it kind of embarrassed me, because to me, that was what I was going to do.”
Parton admitted this reaction stung.
“Graduation hurt my feelings really bad,” she said, per the book Ain’t Nobody’s Fool by Martha Ackmann.
As she got older, though, she began to doubt that her classmates were mocking her. Instead, she thought they were simply surprised by her answer.
“It was only years later that I realized that, that was just a big dream for a little kid,” she said. “It was not so much of making fun as just a reaction to a big dreamer like that.”
She said she didn’t like school
Parton admitted that she didn’t enjoy school.
“Boy, I did not like school,” she wrote in her book, Dream More. “I guess a lot of kids feel the same way. I’m still not sure what I learned in school, except that boys were a distraction. They still are. (Hey, I’m married, not blind!)”
Her dreams had something to do with this. She felt antsy to move forward with her goals, and her parents wouldn’t let her drop out of high school.
“It was always my dream that when I graduated from high school that I was going to move to Nashville,” Parton wrote in her book Songteller: My Life in Lyrics. “My daddy wouldn’t have let me go before then anyway. He’d have sent a posse after me if I had left home. So I stayed in school, even though I didn’t like it.”
Dolly Parton moved to Nashville immediately after her high school graduation
Parton moved to Nashville the day after she graduated from high school. She knew this was the right move for her career, but it wasn’t an easy decision.
“I cried almost all the way to Nashville,” she wrote to her parents, per the book Smart Blonde by Stephen Miller. “I wanted to turn around a few times and come back. But you know how bad I’ve always wanted to go to Nashville and be a singer and songwriter.”
She spent years struggling to get her career off the ground, but she eventually became one of the city’s biggest success stories.
