Born into a musical family
Dolly Rebecca Parton was born on the banks of the Little Pigeon River in Tennessee’s Great Smoky Mountains on Jan. 19, 1946. The fourth of 12 children, Parton grew up inside a two-log Appalachian cabin with a family whose musical roots went back generations.
She spoke often of using the front porch as her earliest stage, fashioning a microphone out of a tin can balanced on a tobacco stick wedged into the crack between the wooden slats.
Parton wrote what would become her first single, Puppy Love, when she was 10 years old. She started making trips to Nashville in the following years with her maternal uncle, country music songwriter Bill Owens, who she later credited for encouraging her career.
