If Dottie Yaworski’s life has had a soundtrack, it has, without a doubt, consisted of old-school country music.

She inherited that fondness from her father, Owen Perkins, who used to play guitar while a 4-year-old Dottie would sit on the floor and listen, rapt.

In their home on Farnsworth Street in New London, there were big walk-in closets, and one housed the family’s Victrola. None of the kids (Dottie was 6th of 14) were allowed to touch that phonograph.

“But I would sneak in there and stay in there for hours, playing them records — Ernest Tubb, all the records, and ‘Pistol Packin’ Mama’ — that’s where I got my (current band’s) name,” Yaworski says.

Later, when she became a parent, Yaworski passed along her adoration of that style of music to her own kids. Raising her four boys and four girls, she says that, when they didn’t have a TV or a car, music provided a happy diversion.

“I had a big, long stereo, and I would sit on the stereo with my guitar and make the kids sit on the floor, and they loved it … I said, ‘Every time I get done singing, you clap and pretend I’m Loretta Lynn at the Grand Ole Opry.’ Well, they did. That was our entertainment,” she says.

And the family didn’t just enjoy listening to music. They learned to perform it, too, singing and playing instruments.

Yaworski taught all of the children how to play the guitar.

“I started them out. They passed me. I’m just old-fashioned country, they can do everything,” she says.

Don’t let Yaworski fool you — she has done pretty well herself. The now-77-year-old started singing with bands at age 12 (she was encouraged by her parents and became, she says, the first female country singer in New London County), and she has been a country-music fixture around the region for decades since.

When she was 12, she played with Bill Monroe when he performed at Ocean Beach Park. (She gives credit to her cousin Johnny Small, who worked at WNLC, for connecting her with Monroe and other country performers.) She was in a band that played warm-up for Kitty Wells’ daughter, Ruby Wells, in the 1970s at the Montville Harvest Festival. She sang with Dick Curless, too, at another year’s Montville Harvest Festival. During the 1970s, she also sang Sundays on a radio station in Waterbury.

In the 1990s, she co-owned a restaurant/bar in Salem where various bands performed — most famously, the Marshall Tucker Band.

While she loves country music, she clearly loves just as much playing it with family members. She has always been in bands with various combinations of her kids, including Whisky River Band years ago and now Pistol Packin’ Mamas. (Her kids are Daidy, Donna, Lora, Susan, Don, Bobby, Tom and Ronnie Barnes.) Yaworski has musical siblings, too.

“We were always close, my family — still are. When one plays somewhere, we’re all there,” she says.

Yaworski still plays in public occasionally, usually at the Turnpike Café in Montville.

And she has finally lived one of her enduring country-music dreams: she has sung on the same stage where her idol, Loretta Lynn, once performed.

Yaworski had always wanted to go to Nashville, and her second husband, Robert Yaworski Jr., had long talked about taking her. But he became ill and died a decade ago from complications from Lyme disease.

Last year, Yaworski finally made it to Music City. She took a trip to Nashville with her now-boyfriend, Dickie Kirchoff, and they visited the iconic Tootsie’s Orchard Lounge every day. That’s where a host of other country legends, including Lynn, have played.

Yaworski was sitting at the bar, listening to musician Tim Daley perform. She was, she recalls, “dressed in my boots, my hat, my country gear,” and she was singing along to every number. Daley noticed her and said, “Let me guess where you’re from; you’re from Kentucky.” She told him she was actually from Connecticut. When he was on a break, he asked her if she sang — and whether she’d like to get up onstage to perform.

“I said, ‘Would I! Sure!'" she recalls.

Yaworski did a couple of songs, “Pick Me Up On Your Way Down” and “Good Old Mountain Dew,” at Tootsie’s and thoroughly enjoyed it.

Daley says, "What really struck me was she still has the passion for the music. She just had an exuberance about her ... She was just so loving. You can't help but fall in love with her when you meet her."

In a couple of weeks, Yaworski is headed back. On April 12, she’ll set off on a drive to Nashville (“I won’t fly. I’m a chicken,” she says) and will sing at Tootsie’s again.

“I always wanted to sing at Tootsie’s because Loretta Lynn did. I’m a Loretta Lynn freak. Everyone says I look like her, so I might as well be her,” she says.

That affection started when she heard a cover that Lynn did with Ernest Tubb of “Are You Mine?”; it was a tune Dottie’s first husband, Ronald Barnes Sr., asked her to sing when they first went out.

She actually met Lynn briefly in the 1970s when she saw her in concert in Elmira, N.Y. It was an outdoor venue, and, when Lynn got off the stage, Yaworski simply approached her.

“I was talking to her, and we walked over to her bus, and I started singing to her, ‘Oh, I burnt the little roadside tavern down …’ and she started singing with me,” Yaworski recalls, referring to Lynn's song "I Burnt the Little Roadide Tavern Down."

‘The sadder the song, the better’

Yaworski grew up loving country music, and she learned how to play guitar from her brother Kenny.

“I’m only a three-chord country girl because he passed away (at age 23 of leukemia) and couldn’t teach me the rest of the chords,” she says. “But I do about 150 songs with three chords. My son says, ‘I don’t know how she does it.’”

Discussing what she likes about country music, Yaworski says, “Everything. The sadder the song, the better" (which is an unexpected sentiment, considering her upbeat and spirited personality).

Yaworski is quick to note that she’s a fan of “just old country music. I don’t like the new music … If anyone wants to come to hear me play, they’d better be ready to hear the old country — and (see) the sparkles and the fringe.”

On a recent day at the Turnpike Café in Montville, Yaworski was indeed decked out in sparkly silver (though no fringe was in sight). Her cowboy hat was silver, as were her shimmering shirt and cowboy boots.

She sat on a stool, played guitar, and sang tunes from the likes of Kitty Wells and Merle Haggard and, naturally, some Loretta Lynn. Most of the people who filled the place seemed to know Yaworski, or “Miss Dottie.” This is, after all, a regular spot for Yaworski, and she says later, “I like to stick to the Turnpike Café because everybody knows me, everyone protects me — not that I need protection … It’s like family, that’s what it seems like. Everybody there is so nice.”

It seems that Yaworski loves performing country music no matter the venue.

Dottie’s son Don Barnes recalls that, when he was in first or second grade at Quaker Hill School, he told his mother that his teacher liked country music.

“The next thing I know, I remember coming to the class, and we were all marching down to the auditorium, and we were all singing Merle Haggard songs to the class … her and I and her sister, my aunt Janet,” he says.

Things have expanded to the next generation of this music-loving family, too. Don, for instance, has played in a band with his own son, Don Jr., for years, first as Braxton Bragg and then Double D’s.

He says that relatives come to his house just for fun — “the bandstand is always set up, so we play with my mother, with all ages. We sit around and play country music.”

His brother, Tom Barnes, who plays lead guitar player for Pistol Packin’ Mamas, says that getting together to play music “is just fun for us. Especially for her — she loves it. It’s like a regular ol’ party.”

Work by day, music by night

Things were tougher back in the late 1970s and early ’80s. When her kids were growing up, Yaworski worked during the day and then played music at night. She cleaned rooms at the Susse Chalet in East Lyme and, later on, made pizzas at Campus Pizza.

After she and her first husband divorced, Yaworski would perform at night with the family’s Whisky River Band at various music venues in the region like Country Café in Colchester and the Howard Johnson’s in Mystic.

“We played six nights a week. I had to keep my family going. Me and my son Ronnie was the sole supporters for the family because my kids were little,” she says.

“We needed enough money to keep a roof over our heads and food on the table. We didn’t have the best of food or the best of clothes, but we had ’em. I didn’t have no sparkles then,” she says with a laugh. “I only had three pairs of boots — a black pair, a brown pair and a white pair. I was like Dolly Parton with her coat of many colors.”

Things have decidedly changed for the better since then, something that’s reflected in the number of cowboy boots she owns now — 60 in various colors, neatly lined up on shelves in her bedroom. Cowboy hats adorn the room, too; she figures she has 20.

“I’m a regular cowgirl,” she laughs.

And, for several years, she owned a performance venue. She and her husband Robert Yaworski Jr. owned the Country Club Restaurant and Lounge in Salem from 1992 to 1998. (They closed the venue when Robert became ill.) All of her kids played there, along with other bands.

Her son Tom remembers that, when she owned the Country Club, she would feed people who were there but didn’t have money. “And those people didn’t forget,” he says.

It’s not only those folks who have an affection for “Miss Dottie.”

“I don’t recall ever meeting someone that didn’t like her,” Tom Barnes says. “Everywhere she goes, it’s like the red carpet is thrown out for her.”

Yaworski says she’s thinking about retiring because of her arthritis, but, considering her enthusiasm for music, that’s hard to imagine.

“She’s one in a million, that’s for sure,” her son Don says. “She’s full of life … I pray I’ll be like her when I’m 77.”