"Coat of Many Colors"

Dolly Parton learned early on in her career that when the muse comes calling, you listen.

In her book Dolly Parton, Songteller:  My Life in Lyrics, she notes that when a great line for lyric comes to her, she has to write it down right then.

“I’ve wanted to smack my own face many times thinking, ‘I knew [that line] was good, but I didn’t write it down so now I can’t remember what it was.’”

With that lesson learned, she says she’ll grab anything that’s available to jot down that moment of inspiration.

“If I come up with an idea, [I’ll take] whatever is in my pocketbook, [even] if it’s the last receipt I got from the drive through at McDonald’s.  I’ll write on a Kleenex box or even on the back of my hand if I don’t have something else handy.”

One of Dolly’s earliest hits came to her while on tour with Porter Wagoner in 1969.  When she reached the tour bus there was no paper to be found.  So Porter gave her a receipt from his dry cleaners, and on the back of it she sketched out the tale of a child who was teased by her schoolmates for wearing a coat her mother had made out of mismatched bits of cloth.

And as The Washington Post pointed out in November 2020:

“This really happened.  Parton’s schoolmates mocked her makeshift coat, then locked her in a closet [which was traumatic for her as a child because] she was afraid of the dark.”

In Songteller Dolly talks about how at that moment she was angry with her mama for not making it clear that they were a poor family.  To which he mother said, “Don’t you ever say we are poor.  We are not poor people.  We don’t have as much material stuff as other people do, but wealth is not measured by a dollar.”