4 Nashville

Chapter 4 Nashville The day after graduation, eighteen-year-old Dolly said good-bye to her family and got on the bus to Nashville. She carried paper bags full of her stuff and a bag of biscuits. She cried for the whole two-hundred-mile trip.

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Dolly moved in with her Uncle Bill and his wife and baby until she could get work and find a place of her own. On her first day in Nashville, Dolly was waiting for her laundry in front of the Wishy-Washy Laundromat when a handsome stranger called out to her, "Y'all gonna get sunburnt out there, little lady." Dolly was such a country girl, she didn't know she shouldn't speak to strangers. That was how she met Carl Dean, her future husband. They started dating, but then Carl joined the army and was away for two years. Dolly's best friend Judy was away in the

air force. Dolly was terribly lonely and homesick. Meanwhile, Uncle Bill helped Dolly meet more people in the music business. Every day Dolly knocked on doors and tried to give away tapes of her songs. No luck. She took waitress and office jobs to get by. Dolly finally got work singing on a local TV show at 5:00 a.m. every morning. It paid enough for her to rent her own place. But Dolly had hardly any money left over for food. Sometimes she ate ketchup, mustard, and water soup. Dolly was so hungry that she went into hotels and took leftovers from trays that people had put in the halls. On a visit home everyone was shocked how skinny she was.

Dolly and Uncle Bill headed out in his old station wagon to find places where they could perform. They often slept in the car—Uncle Bill in front and Dolly in back. They played in bars... some places had chicken wire to protect performers from things thrown by the audience. Dolly was exhausted but still managed to write songs every day. She wrote over one hundred songs in three years (some of them with Bill). Dolly didn't just write love songs. She wrote

about the ups and downs of country life: motherhood, children, mental illness, poverty, birth, and death. Less than two years after high school, Dolly got to record with Bill for Monument Records, an important record label in Nashville. Their records didn't do well, but Dolly was asked to appear on a TV show, Chicago Bandstand. Dolly flew there. It was her first time on an airplane. Dolly hated it.