Dolly Parton’s Guitarist Listened to Her Concert in ‘Disgust’ Because of How Corny It Was

When Dolly Parton played concerts in the 1970s, she won the audience over with jokes and banter that was, according to her guitarist, often pre-written. She repeated the same jokes to her band show after show. While these lines got a laugh from a fresh audience, her band members began to tire of them. Tom Rutledge, her guitarist, said he could scarcely listen back to a recording of one concert.

Dolly Parton’s guitarist cringed when he listened to one of her concerts

In between songs during her concerts, Parton chatted to her audience and band members. The jokes were often, as a New York Times critic put it, “appallingly corny.” Rutledge said they were typically only funny when they went off-script. 

“One of the rare cases when I remember anything funny happening on the stage is when Randy [Parton] screwed up [a key] line,” Rutledge said in the book Dolly by Alanna Nash. “I can’t remember exactly what he said, but we all got so tickled we couldn’t go on with the show. There was about a five-minute pause. It kinda got out of control.”

Rutledge said Parton preferred to stick to the script, but she was able to banter with her brother on this occasion. Rutledge found it funny, but he admitted he usually cringed at the jokes.

“But usually the show was all very orchestrated — the whole thing, and it is today,” he said. “Really, I’ve tried to forget those lines. Several months ago, I was over to see Joe [McGuffee], and he’d found a cassette of the old show. I hadn’t even thought of it in a year and a half, and when I heard it, it brought back disgust, it was just so bad.”

Dolly Parton’s guitarist didn’t think her family band could take her where she wanted to go

Rutledge was one of the few members of Parton’s Traveling Family Band who wasn’t related to her. She hired her siblings, cousins, aunts, and uncles to join her on the road in various roles. Rutledge believed this was a mistake. Parton took comfort in having her family with her on the road. Unfortunately, they were not a strong enough band to lift her to the heights she wanted to reach.

“She’s just now getting close to where she wants to be in the business,” he said. “She wants … a band that can play both sounds, a band she can record with, with the quality of production onstage the way she wants it. She wants the right lighting, the right material, and she wants it staged right. She’s miles ahead of everybody else in the country music business, in terms of how she wants to present her show. She’s aware of all the different facets of it, and she was always held back by her band, because it was just almost too country or too regimented.”

He believed she needed to move forward with a completely different band. 

“[E]ven though I was sorry to leave the band, I can see now, in retrospect, that she needed to give it up, because there’s no way in the world she could be where she’s at now with the old band,” he said. “It just wouldn’t have worked, period. I mean, leaving aside the family, it wouldn’t have worked, and then she had all the tensions that come with working with a family in a business situation.”

She eventually let go of her family band

Though it was difficult for her to reach this point, Parton eventually came to agree with Rutledge.

“They are all talented, and I love each of them dearly. They are not at all at fault for what happened,” she wrote in her book Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business. “I had made a huge mistake. Here I was trying to listen to another voice, trying to move in a new direction, and my falling back into my family was grounding me in my past. Their music is wonderful and pure and does reflect the truest, deepest part of me, but I was hearing a different drummer.”

She said it was wrenchingly painful to let go of the group, but she knew it was necessary.