Dolly performed at her local church where her grandfather was a preacher.
“I keep all that stuff very close to my heart,” she explains. “I grew up knowing that Jesus loves me. And I knew that through God all things were possible. I grew up with those things that we just heard all the time. My grandfather was a really good preacher.”
“He use to scare me a little bit,” she admitted. “I wrote a song years ago called ‘Daddy Was an Old Time Preacher Man.’ It was about him, about my grandpa. One of the lines is ‘he preached hell so hot, you could feel the heat.’”
At the age of 10, a family member gifted her first guitar, and she quickly began writing her own tunes. She’d perform on local television and radio shows in Knoxville. Dolly made her Grand Ole Opry debut at just 13, and from there she was set on chasing after her music career. After graduating high school, she moved to Nashville to pursue her dreams.
Dolly’s music career took off
It was 1967 when Dolly’s Nashville career really started to take off. She was discovered by Porter Wagoner, and the two performed as a duo on the Porter Wagoner Show. The pair became popular and recorded a slew of country hits together.
