Dolly Parton writes particularly eloquently about how spankings used to happen in her parents’ house:

When one of us had done something wrong, the rest would rather die than tell on the guilty party. I don’t know if that was out of loyalty to brothers and sisters or some unspoken code of the mischievous that made us keep silent knowing the same service would be afforded us when we were the one who “done it.” Whatever the reason, our failure to cooperate with the party of the second party (the one holding the belt) usually meant we would all end up getting spanked. If we had taken a minute to think about that, we would have figured out that the loyalty we were drawing interest on in that unspoken kid bank was not really doing us any good if it was intended to be insurance against getting our butt beaten for some future offence. This way, we were bound to get whipped not only for that future one but for every present one as well. Still, the code was followed, and I supposed there was some kind of integrity in it, if not the clearest of logic.

I would always want to be the last in line. My plan was to run around to be first in line before daddy got to me, but that never worked. You’d think a man with that many kids would lose count just once in his life. Being in last place, and being a sensitive kid, I ended up feeling every blow to every other kid just as if it had landed on my butt.

Daddy used to spank us with a leather strap. But when mama whipped us, she would send us out to pick out a switch. We would try a crude form of mountain-urchin psychology by choosing a big, dangerous-looking stick that mama wouldn’t have the heart to hit us with. We’d go out to fetch a switch but come back with a limb that would be better used as a fence post. Our psychology usually backfired when mama would only get madder and go out herself and pick out one of those reedy little sting-your-butt-bad switches.

I love the tactics of cutting a hopefully-too-big-to-be-used switch. I’ve done it myself before, trying to signal something like “See how sorry I am? I’m sorry enough to present you with a whole tree limb!”

It didn’t work for me any better than it did for Dolly.