Long before becoming one of the most famous artists in the world, Dolly Parton grew up in a large family with very little money in Tennessee. And some of the things that seem completely normal today entered her life much later than anyone might imagine.
One of them was a toilet.
In a 1978 interview, Dolly recalled with a laugh that her aunt had the first toilet she and her siblings had ever seen.
And it certainly wasn’t love at first sight.
“We were fascinated. We were scared. I was afraid to use it. I thought it was going to suck us in“, the singer recalled.
Dolly estimated that this happened when she was around 8 years old, approximately the same time she also saw a television for the first time.
Her aunt’s house, therefore, seemed to belong to another world to young Dolly.
But the toilet wasn’t the only novelty. The singer also recalled that, during her childhood, her family did not have a conventional bathroom.
In the summer, the siblings went to the river to bathe. Dolly said they all got into the water, washed one another’s hair, and used soap while they were there.
“The river was like one big bathroom“, she recalled.
During the winter, the situation was even more complicated. The family used a basin of water to wash, and because so many people lived in the house, they had to take turns to get some privacy.
Dolly even said that during that time, they bathed approximately once a week.
Years later, that reality was far removed from the singer’s life, but the anecdote remained in her memory.
And perhaps the most curious thing is imagining a child who had never yet seen a modern toilet approaching one for the first time and thinking that, if she pressed the wrong button, she could end up being sucked into it.
A scene Dolly recalled decades later with humor, but which also shows how different her childhood was before she became a global superstar.