What was Dollys first song?
She wrote a song about her corn-cob doll, “Little Tiny Tassletop,” around age 3. Since she couldn’t yet read or write, her mother wrote down the words for her. What is Dolly’s favorite of her songs? She jokes that it’s “I Will Always Love You” because of the money Whitney Houston earned her by singing it, but she says with all sincerity that it is her 1971 classic “Coat of Many Colors.” The song tells the true story of a coat her mother sewed for her out of several mismatched scraps of cloth. To help her from being ashamed of the coat, her mother told her the story of Joseph’s coat of many colors from the Bible. When she got to school, the children teased her about the coat. In the song, she notes that she tried to make the other kids see that while her family didn’t have money, they were rich in love, personifying her mother’s love for her as the coat. In reality, the teasing was much worse than in the song. Dolly didn’t have a shirt on under the coat and was starting to “blossom,” so
