Dolly Rebecca Parton was born on January 19, 1946, in a one-room cabin on the banks of the Little Pigeon River in Pittman Center, Tennessee. She is the fourth of twelve children born to Avie Lee Caroline (1923–2003) and Robert Lee Parton Sr. (1921–2000). Parton's middle name comes from her maternal great-great-grandmother Rebecca (née Dunn) Whitted.
Parton's father, known as "Lee", worked in the mountains of East Tennessee, first as a sharecropper and later tending his own small tobacco farm and acreage. He also worked construction jobs to supplement the farm's small income. Despite her father's illiteracy, Parton has often commented that he was one of the smartest people she has ever known with regard to business and making a profit.
Parton's mother cared for their large family. Her eleven pregnancies (the tenth being twins) in twenty years made her a mother of twelve by age thirty-five. Parton attributes her musical abilities to the influence of her mother; often in poor health, she still managed to keep house and entertain her children with Smoky Mountain folklore and ancient ballads. Having Welsh ancestors, Avie Lee knew many old ballads that immigrants from the British Isles brought to southern Appalachia in the 18th and 19th century. Avie Lee's father, Jake Owens, was a Pentecostal preacher and Parton and her siblings all attended church regularly.
Parton has long credited her father for her business savvy and her mother's family for her musical abilities.
When Parton was a young girl, her family moved from the Pittman Center area to a two-room cabin and farm on nearby Locust Ridge. Most of her cherished memories of youth happened there. A replica of the Locust Ridge cabin is displayed at Parton's namesake theme park Dollywood. The farm acreage and surrounding woodland inspired her to write the song "My Tennessee Mountain Home" in the 1970s. Years after the farm was sold, Parton bought it back in the late 1980s. Her brother Bobby helped with building restoration and new construction.
Parton has described her family as being "dirt poor". Parton's father paid missionary Dr. Robert F. Thomas with a sack of cornmeal for delivering her. Later in life, Parton wrote a song about Dr. Thomas. She also outlined her family's poverty in her early songs "Coat of Many Colors" and "In the Good Old Days (When Times Were Bad)".
For six or seven years, Parton and her family lived in their one-bedroom cabin on their small subsistence farm on Locust Ridge. This was a predominantly Pentecostal area located north of the Greenbrier Valley of the Great Smoky Mountains. Music played an important role in her early life. She was brought up in the Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee), in a congregation her grandfather, Jake Robert Owens, pastored. Her earliest public performances were in the church, beginning at age six. At seven, she started playing a homemade guitar. When she was eight, her uncle bought Dolly her first real guitar.
The Parton family was well-fed despite their poverty, and her 2024 cookbook, Good Lookin' Cookin' (co-written with her sister Rachel), recalls numerous family meals.
After graduating from Sevier County High School in 1964, Parton moved to Nashville the next day.
