In her decades in the music industry, it’s safe to say Dolly Parton has been dealt her fair share of advice, and the singer is opening up about the advice she’s grateful she didn’t follow.
Dolly has long been vocal about the fact that she patterned her flashy look and costumes after the hooker who lived in her hometown of Sevierville, TN. And while she may have been met with resistance of her appearance over the years, the titan of industry stands firm in how she presents herself.
“The main advice that people wanted to give me was to change my look and to go simpler with my hair and the way that I dress, not to look so cheap, nobody was ever going to take me seriously they would say,” she explains to Adam Grant on his podcast, WorkLife.
“The way I look and the way I looked then was a country girl’s idea of glam, just like I wrote in my ‘Backwoods Barbie’ song. But people wanted me to change…It was really like a look I was after. And I wasn’t a natural beauty, I just like to look the way I look,” she continues. “I’m so outgoing inside and my personality, and I need the way I look to match all of that.”
Dolly recently released a novel, Run, Rose, Run, that debuted at #1 on the New York Times’ best-selling fiction book list last month.
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