She Has 11 Siblings
Dolly Rebecca Parton was born on 19 January 1946 as the eighth of twelve children. The doctor who delivered her was paid in with a bag of cornmeal by her father as they were “dirt poor”.
Parton spent her formative years on a farm in the Great Smoky Mountains near Locust Ridge. “My Tennessee Mountain Home” was inspired by her cherished memories of youth living there.
The family lived in a one-room rustic cabin in her early years with her father worked primarily as a sharecropper, while her mother stayed at home to look after the dozen young ones.
The singer later expressed her family’s poverty in her early songs “Coat of Many Colors” and “In the Good Old Days (When Times Were Bad)”.