A Tiny But Lovely Q&A with Dolly Parton – HuffPost 4.16.14

Mike Ragogna: Dolly, you’ve had an amazing recording and music history. When you look back at young Dolly Parton, what would you tell her?

Dolly Parton: [laughs] Well, I would tell her I’m pretty proud of her, because when you get older, you really reflect and you really think so many things. One of the things I think about is just how fortunate that I have been to have been able to actually see my dreams come true, because I know so many people that can’t say that. I know so many people that are far more talented than me and that have worked just as hard and came to town the same time I did and never really made it big. So you wonder, and you kind of go back to that Kris Kristofferson song, “Why Me Lord?” You just really think about all those things. But more than anything, I just think that little girl who moved here back in ’64 to try to make those dreams come true and now here I am at sixty-eight years old and so many of them have come true. But what’s so funny is I still feel like that little girl. I’m still dreaming, dreaming big. I’ve still got new dreams to dream, new dreams I hope to come true, so I just love the music, I just love to write, I love to perform and I hope to be doing this until I keel over dead in about thirty years.

MR: [laughs] Dolly, I have to ask you my traditional question. What is your advice for new artists?

DP: Well as I’ve often said, I try not to give advice, I just try to pass on some information. But I think it’s true with anything, like that old saying, “To thine own self be true,” I think there’s really so much to that, that people know what they really want, they know what their strength and their talent really is and I think you need to be willing to sacrifice that if you have to. You’ve got to protect it, you’ve got to fight for it and if you really are that good and you really have that much faith in it, if you really stay in it long enough changes are it will happen and if it don’t I’ve always said, if you’re really dreaming an impossible dream, you should know that it’s okay to change dreams in the middle of a stream. If it’s something that’s not going to happen you can still rework it and apply what you’ve learned from the other stuff to a new dream.

MR: These are very sweet answers, thank you so much.

Transcribed by Galen Hawthorne