We’ve got a little girl here up from east Tennessee. Her daddy’s listening to the radio at home and she’s gonna be in real trouble if she doesn’t sing tonight, so let’s bring her out here.” Out from the wings comes Dolly Parton, 13 years old and awestruck by Johnny Cash, introducing her Grand Ole Opry debut in Nashville, 25 July 1959.
“Johnny was like Elvis – he stirred everything up in me,” Parton recalls in her new book, Star of the Show: My Life on Stage. “He was just so sexy, and he moved around in all these weird ways. “ She found out later that his strange jerking movements were “probably just because of what he might’ve been on or coming off of at the time”, but still, having the country music king introduce her was a huge deal. So overwhelming, in fact, that Parton almost froze right there onstage at the storied Ryman Auditorium. Then someone in the audience snapped a photo. Flash! She snapped back into it: “I just let loose.” That night, she got three encores.
