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Country superstar Dolly Parton once spoke about how she and her siblings were disciplined while growing up.

Published on May 13, 2023

Dolly Parton grew up in the mountains of East Tennessee. She had a childhood that’s worlds away from the life she lives now. Once, the Queen of Country went into what getting disciplined was like for herself and her siblings. 

Dolly Parton said she and her siblings were not ‘abused’

In Parton’s first memoir, Dolly Parton: My Life and Other Unfinished Business, the “Coat of Many Colors” singer wanted to make something clear: she was not coming out saying she “was abused” as a child “as some celebrities have.” 

“None of us kids were,” she wrote. “We were not beaten. We got plain old Tennessee butt whippin’s. And in truth, we deserved them.”

Her intention was to explain what life was like in the mountains growing up. How her parents disciplined her and her siblings was a big part of that.  

The Parton kids never told on each other

Parton and her siblings lived by a strict code: No snitches. 

“When one of us had done something wrong, the rest would rather die than tell on the guilty party,” she wrote. “I don’t know if that was out of loyalty to brothers and sisters or some unspoken code of the mischievous that made us keep silent knowing the same service would be afforded us when we were the one who ‘done it.’” 

But because the Parton kids were so loyal to one another, they’d all get spanked when no one came forward to confess. Thinking back, Parton realized this meant they all got spanked a lot more than if they just would have ratted each other out. 

“If we had taken a minute to think about that, we probably would have figured out that the loyalty we were drawing interest on in that unspoken kid bank was not really doing us any good if it was intended to be insurance against getting our butt beaten for some future offense,” she wrote. “This way, we were bound to get whipped not only for that future one but for every present one as well. Still, the code was followed, and I supposed there was some kind of integrity in it, if not the clearest of logic.”

Mr. and Mrs. Parton had different methods of punishment 

Parton’s father would have the kids line up and spank them one by one with a leather strap. The “Don’t Make Me Have to Come Down There” singer would always try to be last, hoping her dad would lose count and forget about her. But her plan never worked.  

“Being in last place, and being a sensitive kid, I ended up feeling every blow to every other kid just as if it had landed on my butt,” she wrote.

Parton’s mother, on the other hand, “would send us out to pick out a switch.”

The kids would try to find the biggest piece of wood they could in hopes that their mom wouldn’t have the heart to use it. 

“We’d go out to fetch a switch but come back with a limb that would be better used as a fence post,” she wrote. “Our psychology usually backfired when Mama would only get madder and go out herself and pick out one of those reedy little sting-your-butt-bad switches.”

Parton doesn’t look back on the discipline of her childhood with negative feelings. Her mindset is such that it all made her who she is today.

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