7 things you might not know about Dolly Parton

A new series tells the story of Dolly Parton, as seen through the eyes and ears of her superfans.

To celebrate her 80th birthday year, 6 Music's Amy Lamé explores her incredible career in 'Superfans!', with further episodes on Ozzy Osbourne, Kate Bush, and Arctic Monkeys.

'Superfans!' explores the lives and music of some of the world's most iconic artists, through the superfans that love them, queue in the rain to see them, collect every record and travel the world for their gigs.

In Dolly Parton's episode, Amy speaks to country music broadcaster Baylen Leonard (who grew up in the same part of Tennessee as Dolly), Welsh superfan duo Sam and Shauna (who made a documentary about Dolly called A Little Bit Country, A Little Bit Cymru), musician and broadcaster Bronwen Lewis, and Ricky Ross from Deacon Blue.

Click to listen to the programme below, and read on to discover 7 things you may not know about Dolly Parton...

Dolly Parton was born in 1949 in Sevier County, Tennessee, and grew up in a one-room cabin on the banks of Tennessee's Little Pigeon River. And despite being from a big family, having six brothers and five sisters, she was quick to stand out from the crowd. She made a name for herself and her talent before she even hit her teens, becoming a child star on local radio and TV performing on the Cas Walker show in Knoxville.

In 1959, Dolly’s first single Puppy Love was released on Goldband Records, a small label based in Louisiana, and that same year, she performed at the Grand Ole Opry for the first time.

Only three years later, Dolly graduated high school and moved to Nashville the next day, and immediately signed to a label there, but she had a little way to go before becoming the country star we know today. She was signed initially as a songwriter for other musicians such as Bill Phillips, Kitty Wells, and Hank Williams Jr, but before long she was releasing her own music - as a bubblegum pop artist!

Ricky Ross: I love Dolly Parton because, first and foremost, I think she is a great songwriter and I think she's come out of an era when solo country artists struggled to be heard... The fact she came from outside of Nashville. She really had never been there. She was from the sticks. She came in, she took part in this crazy thing of co-writing and the whole circus that is in the Nashville country scene and succeeded at it.

Dolly recently traced her family tree back to the Welsh Valleys. Her mother’s surname, Owens, led her back to a great-grandmother in North Wales, in a small town called Conway. Dolly told Wales Online about her own visits to the country: "I've been there about three times and it always feels good because it feels like family."

Sam and Shauna: In Wales, we absolutely love Dolly Parton… She's always had connections to Wales, she runs something called the Imagination Library, where she gives kids over a million books a year to be able to read, and one of her big projects is in Merthyr Tydfil. She’s always had a really strong, lovely, beautiful connection with Wales. And of course, in Wales, we like to think of ourselves as singers as well and the land of song. I think that idea of this mountain music really does translate to the heart of Welsh people. So I think we recognise a bit of our DNA in Dolly Parton.

Bronwen Lewis: I've translated most of Dolly's catalogue of songs, and it's funny, I was doing this even before she mentioned her possible Welsh lineage, and I know they've traced it sort of to North Wales, where there's a lot of Welsh speakers. And it's just, it's a mad coincidence, really, that that happened. But I've translated Jolene, I've translated Coat of Many Colours, amongst many others, I Will Always Love You, of course, and when I perform them, it's almost as if it's always meant to have been sung in Welsh.

Dolly was not only born and raised in Tennessee, but it's been her home throughout her life.

In 1964, Dolly met her future husband Carl Dean in a chance encounter soon after she first moved to Nashville. Two years later, they were married, and lived together in Tennessee, first in Antioch and finally settling in Brentwood, and their home there became their primary residence.

She has often returned to Tennessee in interviews and in her music, reflecting on her own life experience - including writing her 1973 album My Tennessee Mountain Home, whose album cover features a photo of the house she grew up in.

This has touched fans across the globe - Tennessee native Baylen and Welsh superfan Bronwen spoke about why this meant so much to them.

Baylen Leonard: She was the first person that helped me realise that sounding like I sounded, and being from where I was from was okay, that it could be cool. Because I didn't grow up thinking that being a hillbilly from Tennessee was cool, but you suddenly saw a hillbilly from Tennessee covered in rhinestones on the global stage, and you realised, "oh - you can be whoever you are, and as long as you're authentic, that's cool…"

[...] As fake as you might think she looks, it's not like she became famous and she changed her accent. She didn't move off to L.A. and stop talking like she was from the hills of Tennessee. And she didn't stop talking about being from Appalachia, growing up in the mountains, growing up poor. And she didn't stop helping the region that she came from. Her being authentic, I think it helps other people be authentic.

Bronwen Lewis: [In] Dolly's music, she talks about the common man. A lot of it is about working people, people who have incredibly difficult, maybe physical labour jobs. I come from a mining community, where the work was tough and the only release, the only time that they could feel any relief from that tough day-to-day was through music. They'd head to the local halls and they'd join choirs. I can understand definitely why our Celtic brothers and sisters love Dolly just as much. Because it's all about a story of normal, real, authentic stories about people who have tough lives but make it sweeter through music.

In 1986, Dolly bought an interest in a local theme park in Knoxville, and it reopened as Dollywood that season, doubling its attendance from the previous year. She developed the park over the years and nowadays it has rides, crafts, food, a museum, local music from the Great Smoky Mountains, and even a replica of the cabin she grew up in.

Her intention was to take her success and give something back to her local area that would bring in a lot of jobs, and she definitely achieved that, as Dollywood now has approximately 4,000 employees and is one of the largest employers in East Tennessee.

Baylen Leonard: Not only is it bringing a lot of joy to people who visit it, but it’s also employing a huge amount of people and it’s a huge economic force in that community. Loads of country artists that have gone on to become quite big stars got their start singing in reviews and in shows at Dollywood. Her entire family, of course, is employed at Dollywood.

[...] Dolly shows up once a year to open the park for the new season in a horse-drawn carriage, as you would expect. But it is also a place that keeps mountain crafts alive and Appalachian crafts alive. So, whether we're talking about blacksmithing or woodworking or basket-weaving or crop rotation, they're all represented at Dollywood. It is also America's largest eagle sanctuary - it's a nature reserve as well!

Dolly's songwriting is one of her most lauded qualities - in 1986 she was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame.

Two of her most iconic songs are Jolene (inspired by a bank clerk who flirted with her husband) and I Will Always Love You (which isn't about a romantic break up as many might assume, but a professional break up, but written as a farewell to her business partner and mentor Porter Wagoner after she went solo).

In recent years Dolly discovered that the original demos of both songs on the same cassette tape, leading her to conclude that the two songs must have been written in the same night. With hindsight she's said that they can't be completely sure if that is the case, but they were certainly written within a few days of each other.

Ricky Ross and Sam and Shauna spoke about what it's like to hear her songs live.

Sam and Shauna: You'll have the old school fans, people in their 70s and 80s that have been following her career for years. But then also you get a lot of young people, really young people. I don't think that there's any other concert that you can go to where you can get such a wide range... There are still young people coming into the fold. And I think that's what makes a Dolly Parton concert so special. I think her music is really cross-generational and it's testament to her incredible songwriting. Even just knowing that she wrote I Will Always Love You and Jolene in the same night - two of the greatest country songs ever written.

Ricky Ross: At Glasgow's Armadillo she did this bluegrass concert and it was just astonishing, just brilliant. And in fact the highlight of the whole thing was the fact that she sang I Will Always Love You just on her own with acoustic guitar, and I thought, "That's all it needs."

I Will Always Love You was very successful in its own right, but went stratospheric when Whitney Houston recorded her iconic cover of it for The Bodyguard in 1992. But she wasn't the only person who wanted to record the song.

When the song hit number 1 in the charts in 1974, Elvis Presley reached out to her about recording a version of the song.

Baylen Leonard: Originally Elvis wanted to record it. And Dolly said no, because at that time Elvis was such a star that he insisted on having half of the songwriting credit, even if he hadn't written a note or a word of the song. In order for him to record it, he got songwriting credit, and Dolly said no. So she very much had an eye on the business side of things as well, and it turned out fine because Whitney did it and bought her a few solid gold houses, I'm sure.

Dolly is known for her iconic sense of style, with bold colours, flamboyant styles, cuts that emphasise her curves - and not to mention sleeves lined with fringes or tops bedazzled with rhinestones! Dolly told Time Magazine that when she first moved to Nashville, she knew how she wanted to look: "Country stars had to have big hair and some sparkles... I related to the clothes that were worn then."

When her record label wanted her to dress more like a pop artist, she told them: "I can’t do what I’m supposed to do as a performer if I don’t feel comfortable within my own skin."

Baylen had the chance to interview her and experience her the sparkles for himself.

Baylen Leonard: I was standing outside of her dressing room and I said to her PR, “Is there anything I can't ask her? And he said, no, if she doesn’t want to answer it, she'll handle it. You can ask her anything.” And I thought, that is the mark of a true star. That is the mark of a consummate professional.

[...] She was exactly what I thought she was going to be, which really surprised me - she was Dolly Parton. She acted like Dolly Parton. She looked like Dolly Parton. She was Dolly Parton... And she was so into the fact that I was from where she was from. And it instantly felt like I was talking to somebody back home.

[Afterwards] I went back into the room with my producer to get our equipment, and on the sofa where Dolly Parton had been sitting was just a scattering of sequins and rhinestones that led out the door, because she had had these jeans on that were, of course, bedazzled and bejeweled. And during the course of the interview, a bunch of them had popped out. And I gathered them up like holy relics. And I still have them. So Dolly literally leaves a trail of rhinestones wherever she goes. And that, I think, sums up Dolly Parton.