The country music legend Dolly Parton just debuted her Apple Fitness+ Time to Walk experience, in which she shares stories, photos and songs that users can walk along to.
“While many of us feel confined during this time,” Parton, 75, told People Magazine. “I’m hopeful that people will take a walk down memory lane with me and we can all feel a little more freedom taking the time to walk together.”
One of the stories that Parton shared was about her late father, who she credits with keeping her humble.
“I always feel like I got my work ethic from my dad,” she said.
Parton’s father Robert was a sharecropper who later grew tobacco on his own land to support the family.
“Daddy used to go down to the courthouse where they had erected a statue of me,” she recalled. “I remember myself being so proud of that statue. … I thought, ‘A statue of me in the courthouse yard? That’s usually reserved for presidents and people that have done really great things like that.’ So I went home and I said, ‘Daddy did you know, they’re putting a statue of me … down at the courthouse?’ And Daddy said, ‘Well yeah, I heard about that.’ And he said, ‘Now to your fans out there you might be some sort of an idol. But to them pigeons, you ain’t nothing but another outhouse.”
Parton added that her dad would take “a bucket of soapy water in the back of his pick-up truck” to clean the statue at night.
“That touched me so much,” she said. “I loved my daddy and wanted him to be proud of himself, as I was proud of him.”
Parton was the fourth of twelve children, and she recently talked about some of her fondest holiday memories with her siblings, revealing that they enjoyed making dumplings together.
“I’m the best! It’s my favorite dish, of all my brothers and sisters — because I cook just like my mom,” she told Entertainment Weekly. “My mom’s dead now, but everybody else, they put too much butter, too much lard, they won’t do this and that. But I still cook good!”
“I make the best dumplings ever, ever, ever. I even make little containers of it and give to my brothers and sisters for Christmas,” Parton added. “I usually cook a big, big pot, and then I’ll always have some for them to take home and freeze and thaw out and eat when they get to missin’ me.”
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