Whoever you are, be that! - Dolly Parton

"One of our favorite family stories tells about a preacher who stopped by one day while Daddy was hard at work. This particular preacher was never much of a help to anybody and seemed to show up only when he was out beatin' the bushes for money. Well, this snooty parson in his starched collar stopped by the fence while my daddy was sweating and groaning and trying to get a stump out of the ground, and he said, "Hello, Lee, this is a right nice place you and the Lord have here." Daddy wiped the sweat from his brow with the back of his sleeve and said, "Yeah, well, you should have seen the som'bitch when the Lord had it by hisself."
I have often joked that we had "two rooms and a path, and running water, if you were willing to run to get it.

Now, that's some lines from the song that you and I did together. I know usually, at a memorial, people talk about somebody. Well, I'm gonna talk to you. 'Cause there is that place on the other side, and I'm certainly gonna see you there, little brother. You left a lot of people here with a lot of precious, precious memories. Everybody loved you. But I doubt that many of 'em loved you more than I did. Anyhow, I just want you to know that we all love you, we all miss you and I bet you're having a big laugh over all of us being sad and sorrowful and I know that would be the last thing you would want us to be. So, anyway, you made us happy while you were here, and we're happy that you're at peace. And I just want you to know that I will always love you. Goodbye, my sweet Leslie. See you over there.

I would sit up on top of the woodpile playing and singing at the top of my lungs. Sometimes I would take a tobacco stake and stick it in the cracks between the boards on the front porch. A tin can on top of the tobacco stake turned it into a microphone, and the porch became my stage. I used to perform for anybody or anything I could get to watch. The younger kids left in my care would become the unwilling audience for my latest show. A two-year-old’s attention span is not very long. So there I would be in the middle of my act, thinking I was really something, and my audience would start crawling away. I was so desperate to perform that on more than one occasion I sang for the chickens and the pigs and ducks. They didn’t applaud much, but with the aid of a little corn, they could be counted on to hang around for a while.