The ‘Dollyism’ That Parton Joked Would Appear On Her Tombstone

Legendary country star Dolly Parton died on Tuesday, but she made a prediction more than four decades earlier about which one of her famous “Dolly-isms” might show up on her tombstone.

In 1982, while filming “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas,” Parton coined a phrase that she would repeat on numerous occasions — so often, in fact, that she told Vanity Fair 26 years later that she expected to see it on her headstone one day.

The phrase in question? “It costs a lot of money to look this cheap.”

Parton made no secret over the years that she’d modeled her signature look after the town tramp — declaring during a number of interviews that she’d grown up in awe of this confident woman with “peroxide-blonde hair” who wore tight clothes and red lipstick. Her mother had told her at the time that the woman was “trash,” a “tramp” — but Parton said she’d known immediately that was what she wanted to be when she grew up.

“I kind of patterned myself after what they called the town tramp in my hometown, when I was little,” Parton explained to CBS anchor Julie Chen on “The Early Show” in 2006. “She left a big impression on me, and I would talk about how beautiful she was and different ones would say, ‘Oh, she’s just trash.’ And I thought, ‘That’s what I want to be when I grow up. I’m gonna be trash!’ And that is how I look.”

Parton also said her flashy outward look was an attempt to match her flashy personality.

But as flashy as she was, Parton never took herself too seriously — and routinely delivered self-deprecating quips about her flamboyant style and multiple cosmetic procedures.

“It’s hard to be a diamond in a rhinestone world,” she said more than once — and she told The Guardian in 2011, “If something is bagging, sagging or dragging, I’ll tuck it, suck it or pluck it … It’s like what I always say: I may look fake but I’m real where it counts.”

When asked how she still looked so young, she quipped, “Well, good lighting, good doctors and good makeup.”

The country music icon was 80 years old.