AceShowbiz - Dolly Parton would only step out of the house without makeup in an "absolute emergency." The 77-year-old country music legend is famous for sporting a glamorous getup whenever she makes an appearance in public and joked that the only time she would be in public au naturel is after she has died or if her husband was sick.

"Death! You'd just have to see me laid out on a stretcher. No, if my husband [Carl Thomas Dean] was sick, or if there was an emergency, of course, I would [leave the house without makeup]," she told PEOPLE when asked at what point the world would see her without makeup.

The "Jolene" hitmaker even joked that if she ever ended up arrested, she would not want to have a mugshot looking like some of her fellow celebrities who have ended up in trouble with the law as she insisted that she would have to "clean up a little" beforehand.

She added, "If I got arrested for a bad tag or whatever, I don't want a mugshot looking like some of the stars I've seen. I'm going to clean up a little if I'm going outside, unless there's an absolute emergency, and it would have to be pretty serious. I would do it then, but that would be the only way."

Dolly has now written the fashion-based book "Behind the Seams: My Life in Rhinestones" and revealed when growing up in rural Tennessee, she would raid her mother's kitchen for makeshift cosmetics.

She said, "The older I get, the more I think, 'Well, people really want to know about how you become who you are once you kind of reach a certain status. So, I thought, 'Why don't I do [a book] about my clothes, my fashion, my hair and all the looks that I've had - good, bad and indifferent?' "

"I'd find ways to create my own makeup with pokeberries and stuff that grew wild in the fields. I think all people that grow up in the mountains learn how to improvise with what you don't have. I would strike Mama's old kitchen matches to make eyebrows and my beauty mark. Still, I find myself mixing and matching different makeups for different colours."