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Dolly Parton has come a long way from her dirt-poor upbringing in the hills of Tennessee, but she's still proud to call herself a hillbilly.

"It's a compliment to me," Parton, 68, told the latest issue of Southern Living. "I mean, we were really Hill. Billies. To me that's not an insult. We were just mountain people. We were really redneck, roughneck, hillbilly people. And I'm proud of it."

Parton went on, "White trash! I am. People always say, 'Aren't you insulted when people call you white trash?' I say, 'Well it depends on who's calling me white trash and how they mean it.' But we really were, to some degree. Because when you're that poor and you're not educated, you fall in those categories."

Of course, Parton is now a multimillionaire, with her hit songs, theme park Dollywood and film roles like "9 to 5? and "Steel Magnolias." But she never forgets where she came from.

"I'm proud of my hillbilly, white trash background," she told the magazine. "To me that keeps you humble; that keeps you good. And it doesn't matter how hard you try to outrun it. If that's who you are, that's who you are. It'll show up once in a while."

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One way her upbringing shows up is in Parton's love for country cooking and iced tea. She told Southern Living her specialty is fried Cornish hens, which her husband, Carl Thomas Dean, loves, along with potato salad and homemade green beans.

She also loves traveling on weekends with her husband in their camper all around her home state. "We try to see all the little, out-of-the-way places [where] other people don't go," she told the magazine.

Then, there's the matter of Parton's love for makeup and big hair.

"When I talk about not being a natural beauty, I'm not," she told Southern Living. "Trust me when I say: In the mornings, I gotta get up and paint on stuff. Those people who wake up and they're just beautiful, they're just born that way. Well that ain't me. I gotta work for everything I've got."