Dolly Parton Reveals the One Thing That Would Make Her Retire
By Movieguide® Contributor
Dolly Parton shared that the one thing that would cause her to retire would be the decline in health of her or her husband, Carl Thomas Dean.
“Work is everything to me,” Parton told USA Today. “That’s all I know. It’s what I do. It’s how all these things have come to pass… I felt like [songwriting] was my gift, but I love to sing too, and I love to perform. So it’s all just one thing to me.”
“I would only retire if I was ill or if my husband was ill and needed me,” Parton added. “That’d be the only thing that would make me pull back.”
Parton’s love for her work was evident even at the beginning of her career when she moved to Nashville the day after she graduated from high school to pursue music.
“I thought, ‘Well, what’s the worst that can happen? I can always go back home, study to be a beautician and sill get cheap makeup and bleach and all the stuff that I was going to always do, no matter what,’” she recalled.
“I was silly enough to believe it could be done, and I didn’t know it couldn’t be done, until I did it, as they say,” Parton continued. “I’d worked in the fields, being a country girl, and I’ve done all that menial labor because that was just the chores and stuff we had to do back home. But I hated every minute of it. I didn’t like school either.”
Beyond her amazing work ethic, Parton has relied on her faith through her ride to the top. She invited God into her life plans when she was only a little girl and has always prayed extensively before making any big decisions.
“My faith impacts everything that I do because I do believe that, through God, all things are possible,” Parton told Fox News Digital last April. “And so, I always ask God to bless everything that I do and the people that I work with and to bring all the right things and right people into my life and to take the wrong ones out.”
“So, I try to just live through love as much as I can. Ans so, I just think that my spirituality has been a guiding light in my life and my strength, really, in my creative energy,” she continued. “And my spiritual energy has really been a great force to keep me going all these years and still being productive.”
Movieguide® previously reported:
Parton is candid about her faith in God and said that she knew to follow God’s plan for her life from a young age.
“My grandpa was a Pentecostal preacher. So healing and praying and being anointed and all that stuff was nothing new to us, cause we survived because of our faith in God,” Parton said.
Parton recalled an older woman praying over her in her childhood church.
“She said I was anointed and [that] I was going to do great things,” Parton remembered. “Mama said…that just means that God has his hand on you, that you may do something special.”
“But that triggered a faith in me, because I believe that I was supposed to do something good…I never let go of that because I always felt responsible to God that I was supposed to be doing something for God. And so I still feel like that. And I’m still doing it. Trying to,” she added.