(Credits: Butterfly Records / Big Machine)
Tue 10 February 2026 2:00, UK
It’s probably fair to say that Dolly Parton is perhaps one of the bravest artists to have ever existed, and nothing she has ever done can be reasonably described as safe, especially not within the confines of country music, where she operated.
Of course, one of the major reasons she ever reached a certain level of fame was her incredible songwriting talent, and the rather exceptional rate at which she used to release hit after hit is frankly unprecedented for an artist in any era. To have remained at the top for so long is a testament to how timeless her songwriting is, and it’s almost certain that her music will live on considerably long after she leaves this earth.
However, the image she had, and the bold, kitschy and often bawdy presentation of herself, was another thing that garnered plenty of attention, and while it was praised by those who understood it from the perspective of her artistry, it equally riled up a number of people, not least within her own family.
Having grown up in a conservative Christian family, her image wasn’t much to the taste of her elders, and while her mother did her best to supposedly protect her from backlash without providing any cutting remarks, she did still have to face the wrath of others in her familial circle.
“They said that I look cheap and I couldn’t wear this, I couldn’t wear that,” she told 60 Minutes Australia in 2025. “I would do it, though. I wasn’t afraid. You know, I would do it. Even if I had to take it off, I’d still do it again.”
Not only were her parents disapproving, but her grandfather, who was a Pentecostal preacher, often used to condemn Parton for the way she looked, claiming that she was “going to hell in a hand basket” for besmirching the family name.
However, despite her mother’s attempts to clean up her image by persuading her to adjust the neck and hemline of her outfits and her grandfather’s disparaging remarks, Parton claims that both of them began to understand things from her perspective a little more when she wrote a song that touched on the holy values that she had been brought up to follow.
On her 1970 collaborative album with Porter Wagoner, Once More, she penned the song ‘Daddy Was An Old Time Preacher Man’, which was a biographical song about her grandfather, Reverend Jake Owens, which praised how he preached the word of God in a way that spoke to her. Given how they’d dismissed her for her unholy appearance, for Parton to have come out and written a song that so generously touches upon the religious upbringing she was taught to follow was enough for them to see things differently.
“He thought I was fine after that,” Parton commented on her grandfather’s reaction. “After that, he’d just meet people on the street. ‘You know Dolly Parton? That’s my granddaughter. You know that old song, ‘Old Time Preacher Man’? That’s about me.’ After he saw that, you know, I was gonna be okay, I was going to make a living, and that I wasn’t as trashy as I looked, that was just the way I looked, he just prayed, ‘Lord, forgive her. She knows not what she does.’ And just let it go.”
While the existence of this one song doesn’t make her any less daring in the grand scheme of things, she was certainly absolved for all of her supposedly sinful country-pop ventures in the eyes of her family, and as far as she was concerned, that’s all she could have possibly asked for.