Dolly Parton doesn’t think she’ll ever retire.
The 71-year-old country music legend has admitted she’s not sure if she’ll ever hang up her guitar and stop performing, and thinks the only way she’ll even consider scaling back her work load is if she or her husband Carl Dean – whom she has been married to for over five decades – were to fall ill.
Asked if she’d ever go into retirement, Dolly said: ”I don’t know what in the world I would do, I don’t even know what that word ‘retire’ means. I’d only do that if my husband was ill and needed me to be there, or if I was too sick to go on. And then I would still be writing songs, coming up with business ideas, being on the phone, creating. That old saying, ‘I’d rather wear out that rust out’, I think I would rust out pretty quickly if I wasn’t busy.”
The ‘9 to 5’ hitmaker is hugely thankful for her fans, and has said she keeps all the presents they give her in a building on her property, as she doesn’t ”have the heart” to throw any of it away.
Speaking to Notebook magazine, she said: ”A lot of wonderful things. Some of them are beautiful and some of them are not. But I haven’t the heart to throw any of it away. I have a big old bunch of storage on my property and I have an area I call the arts and crap building, so I put all the arts and crap in there. It’s all precious and I know they spent as much time on the bad ones as the good. Some of them have even made it into my museum.”