Long before Dolly Parton met and fell in love with her now-husband, Carl Dean, she had her eyes on another man! The Tennessee native recently revealed her first crush was Johnny Cash, who opened her eyes to a whole new world, at least when it came to feeling attracted to someone else. For Parton, her attraction to Cash came at a time when she also discovered her love of the Grand Ole Opry, where she has been a member for more than 50 years.
“I became a member 50 years ago,” Parton revealed on Late Night with Seth Meyers. “That was my dream to be a member, but I’ve been actually doing the Opry for 60 years. I was on when I was 13. It was amazing, because my uncle Bill Owens used to take me back and forth to Nashville. That was when Johnny Cash was first on the scene.
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“He was the sexiest thing I’d ever seen, I was 13 years old,” she continued. “I was looking at him and I was feeling all these things that you feel. That’s the first time I really understood what sex appeal really was. And I just really fell into a burning fire! But I loved him. He introduced me.”
Parton wed Dean when she was just 20 years old, and her husband remains her biggest supporter to this day, even if he isn’t necessarily a fan of her music.
“He’s proud of me,” Parton told Good Morning Britain. “And he loves that I love what I do. I think it’s just, it’s a touchy subject. I’m like his little girl, I think. He just worries about that. He likes hard rock, he likes Led Zeppelin and bluegrass music, so my music is somewhere in between. He doesn’t dislike it, but he doesn’t go out of his way to play my records, let’s put it that way.”
Parton can still turn heads with her high heels and short dresses – a look she has maintained throughout her career, even if its inspiration came from an unlikely place.
“Well don’t I look sort of like a hooker?” the 73-year-old quipped. “There was a town tramp in our little town, where everybody said she was. I thought she prettiest thing I’d ever seen. She had this big yellow hair, high-heeled shoes, red nails. When I was little, we were just country kids, and we went to town, I’d see her and I’d just be fascinated.
“And everybody said, ‘Oh she ain’t nothing but trash!’” the singer added. “And I thought, ‘Well that’s what I’m gonna be when I grow up, trash.’ That’s how I patterned my look. And honestly to this day I feel more comfortable wearing high heels and flashy things.”
Photo Credit: Getty / Rich Fury
