Dolly Parton Said Porter Wagoner Broke Her Heart With the Interviews He Gave About Her
After Dolly Parton and Porter Wagoner went their separate ways, he turned to the media to complain about her. Wagoner hadn’t wanted Parton to leave his show, but he maintained a working relationship with her as her producer. When she told him she wanted to go in a different direction with her music, he was furious. Parton said that seeing the things Wagoner was saying about her broke her heart.
Porter Wagoner spoke poorly about Dolly Parton in the press
As Parton worked to bring herself more mainstream success, she shook up many parts of her music career. She had been working with Wagoner as her producer, but she decided to produce her own records. He took this as a major betrayal.
“I don’t know why she did it,” he said in the book Dolly by Alanna Nash. “And that’s the thing. I can’t understand why a person with any kind of background and any kind of soul would be afraid to tell a person that. Because I feel that’s something I should know, why it happened. And until now, I don’t know. It’s a heavy thing for you to have that much of your life wrapped up in a certain area and spend as much time and as much energy in the production of records, then all of a sudden see it crumble and not know why.”
He complained that he had sacrificed his career to work on hers. Wagoner didn’t think Parton gave him enough thanks for his efforts.
“I put a lot of energy into making her records great, and my own records suffered,” he said. “In 1975, I spent 568 hours in RCA studios, and 95 percent of the time was on Dolly’s records or the duets … Believe me, I wish her well [but] if she’s number one for ten years she won’t be happy.”
Dolly Parton said it broke her heart to hear Porter Wagoner talk about her like this
Wagoner railed against Parton in countless interviews, which caused her a tremendous amount of pain.
“It just broke my heart what he said about me, that he didn’t know why I left him, which is not the truth,” she said.
She didn’t believe he accurately portrayed the reason for their split. Parton believed he wanted to paint her as the bad guy in the situation.
“Me and Porter fought all the time. We’ve fought for years,” she said. “I tried to tell him what I was trying to do. I tried to tell him my dreams and plans, but it was too touchy a thing. I had to go because we couldn’t share it together because he wouldn’t accept it. The article made me look like I had done a bad, vicious thing. It was as if he was trying to make me look bad and him good. He’s no better than me. I think we’re pretty equal.”
She said he knew better than to say these things
Parton also bristled at Wagoner’s complaint that helping her ended up hurting his career. He chose to work with her, and she paid him.
“When he said he had worked in the studio for all those hours, it was what he chose to do,” she said. “He got paid as my producer. I’d like to think I was not so bad, the way I sounded, like he had to spend all his life trying to make me sound good enough to sell.”
While she appreciated the years they worked together, she didn’t think the way he treated her after was fair.
“I appreciate the things he’s done for me. I have my own kind of respect and admiration for him,” she said. “But he knows better than to make it sound like I just left, that he didn’t know why. My dreams were so big that they were turning into nightmares because I didn’t have anyone to help me carry them out.”
