Avie Lee couldn’t afford to buy her daughter a coat. 🧵
So she took scraps of old fabric and, with her own hands, sewed one for Dolly Parton. To make the girl feel special and not ashamed, she told her the biblical story of Joseph and his coat of many colors. Dolly arrived at school with her chest puffed out with pride. But her classmates only saw sewn-together rags, and laughed at her until they made her cry on the way home.
That wound stayed buried for years, until in 1969 Dolly decided to turn it into a song. She gave it the same name as her mother’s story: “Coat of Many Colors”. In every verse, she not only told of the poverty she experienced in the Appalachians, but of the very love Avie Lee had sewn into every scrap.
She recorded it in 1971, and it reached number 4 on the U.S. country charts. Today, the Country Music Hall of Fame recognizes it as one of the pieces that best portrays her childhood. What some children turned into mockery, Dolly turned into a legacy. 💛
