Songfacts®:

• Dolly Parton wrote this while riding around New York City. She recalled the story of the song to American Songwriter magazine. "I was in New York and we were doing rehearsals for the Broadway Musical 9 to 5," she said. "All of the big city lights and all of the big music and it was my birthday and I usually try to write something on my birthday every year and so I was just riding in a limousine and I was looking out at the skyline, and I was thinking 'Lord, here I am in New York City!' all the way from the Smoky Mountains. And I was just singing in the back of the car while we were getting to the place and I started singing "Oh I know I am only dreaming," just to take myself back home. And it kept getting gooder and gooder! I thought wow! This is kinda an unusual feeling to being in the big city writing something that "mountainish" and so I got out of the car and I was going up the elevator because I thought there was a piano or something up there. And, I was writing it on the back of my script because I didn't have paper, my 9 to 5 script and I was writing on the back of it. So I went in and this woman said 'do you need anything?' and I said 'no I'm writing a song I need to get somewhere' and she said 'do you need a piano?' and I said 'no you don't have a dulcimer do you?' And, so I just put it down."
  
  "When I got back to the hotel I put it down on a cassette and I went in the studio with Kent Wells, and we were recording at the time probably 'Backwoods Barbie,' after I got back from New York," Dolly continued. "I said 'Kent I wrote a song that I really think is good, but I didn't put it down with any music so I'm just going to sing it a cappella.' So I was down in the studio and I just started singing the song and I sang the whole song a cappella and Kent said 'God! I love that!' And so he just started putting instruments on it and so we didn't record it like a record, he just started adding what he felt was that old timey sound and so he tuned his guitar down into that old mountain sound. Then we started adding stuff to it and it was all based on my original emotion singing it a cappella."
• Backwoods Barbie was the first album released through Dolly's newly established Dolly Records, a label she formed to focus exclusively on her own music. She explained her decision in a press release: "I put it on my own label because many of the majors really didn't want me because of my age, thinking I was over. But I feel different about that. I figured the major labels are pretty much a thing of the past anyway, kind of like they thought I was! The way music is being played today, why not make all the money, if there's any money to be made. I'd rather have all of something than some of nothing."
• Featuring the singles "Better Get To Livin'" and "Jesus & Gravity," the album brought Dolly her greatest chart success in 15 years. It peaked at #17 on the albums chart and #2 on the Country chart.