Dolly Parton’s Siblings ‘Grew to Hate’ Seeing Their Dad Come Home After Drinking
Dolly Parton had a close relationship with her dad, Lee Parton. She founded her Imagination Library in his honor and looked forward to giving him and her mother a good life. Still, her father had a side that Parton and her siblings didn’t like to see. Parton’s sister, Stella, spoke about the part of her father she disliked.
Dolly Parton’s sister spoke about her relationship with her dad
Parton and her many siblings were no strangers to corporal punishment while they were growing up. Parton said her father whipped them.
“He didn’t beat us, but he’d whip us hard,” she said, per the book Ain’t Nobody’s Fool by Martha Ackmann. “We’d get to go get a switch and they were pretty good-sized ones. I remember getting whipped with a stick of stove wood once.”
While the children who grew up near them said this was standard for the time, the Partons said Lee’s temper could be unpredictable. When the tobacco crop didn’t perform well, Lee would often stop at the bar on the way home. Stella said when he got home, they all knew to avoid him.
“I grew to hate seeing him stagger through the door in the middle of the night drunk,” she said.
She noted that she worried about seeing him hit their mother, and admitted to witnessing this “a few times.”
Her mother once told their father he was going ‘straight to hell’
In order to supplement the family’s income, Lee Parton also made moonshine.
“My daddy made moonshine for a while, and Mama didn’t like that,” she wrote in her book Dolly Parton, Songteller: My Life in Lyrics. “He didn’t really want to do it, but people make moonshine in the mountains because they need the income. So Daddy did that for a time, and so did a lot of my relatives. It broke a lot of hearts, because not only did they make it, they drank it.”
Parton’s mother saw alcohol as a sin and frequently said her husband was going “straight to hell” for making it.
Dolly Parton spoke about her relationship with her dad
Parton valued her relationship with her father. When she founded her Imagination Library, a program that provides free books for children, she had her father in mind. He felt very touched by this.
“Before he passed away, my Daddy told me the Imagination Library was probably the most important thing I had ever done,” she wrote on the program’s official website. “I can’t tell you how much that meant to me because I created the Imagination Library as a tribute to my Daddy. He was the smartest man I have ever known but I know in my heart his inability to read probably kept him from fulfilling all of his dreams.”
The program provides books for millions of children every month.
