Dolly Parton Carried a .38, and She Never Apologized for It

Dolly Parton died Tuesday at 80, and the tributes have poured in for the music, the movies, and the boundless philanthropy. Here’s one more thing worth remembering about the country legend: she was a gun owner who carried for self-defense, said so plainly, and never once seemed embarrassed by it.

The proof is in her own words. In a now-famous 1978 Playboy interview with journalist Lawrence Grobel, Parton described an early trip to New York City — a story any concealed carrier will recognize in their bones.

A Nashville Permit and a New York Night

Parton and her lifelong friend Judy Ogle, green to the big city, found themselves out on the street late at night when a group of men began closing in. “All of a sudden, these men started approachin’ us on the street,” she told Playboy. “They thought we were up for sale.” The men wouldn’t take no for an answer, and one got physical — “really pullin’ at me… just maul me, the whole works,” as she put it. Her friend, doubled over laughing against a wall, was no help at all.

“I Always Carry a Gun”

What those men didn’t know was that Parton was armed. She told Grobel she never traveled without a firearm — and decades later, she still didn’t.

“I always carry a gun,” she said. “A .38 pistol. I have a permit for it in Nashville. I just carry it for protection. I feel safer when I’ve got it. I just don’t like the idea of knowin’ I’m totally helpless.”

That’s the entire case for armed self-defense, delivered in a few sentences by a woman in a towering wig and a wide Southern smile — years before “concealed carry” was a mainstream phrase.

And She Was Ready to Use It

The .38 wasn’t a security blanket. When the man kept grabbing at her, she drew it. “I told the man, ‘If you put your hands on me one more time, I swear to God that I will shoot you,’” she recounted. “And I would have.” She added that she wouldn’t have aimed to kill — she’d have put rounds at his feet instead. The man backed off. The two women made it home. Her friend, by Parton’s account, never did stop laughing.

Carried in Spite of the Law

The quiet defiance in the story is the setting. Parton was carrying her Tennessee-permitted revolver in New York City — a place that, under its old Sullivan Act, treated the right to bear arms as a privilege doled out by bureaucrats. A Nashville permit meant nothing there. She carried anyway, because being helpless in a strange city wasn’t a trade she was willing to make. It would take until 2022 and the Supreme Court’s Bruen decision for the law to catch up to what Dolly Parton already understood on that sidewalk: the right to protect yourself doesn’t stop at a state line.

That refusal to be a victim — matter-of-fact, unashamed, entirely her own — was of a piece with everything else about her. There will never be another like her. Rest in peace, Miss Parton.