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Emmylou Harris and Dolly Parton worked together on an album for the first time in 1987. Years before this, though, Harris was growing to be a big fan of Parton. She praised her voice and writing, noting that she could imbue her work with powerful emotions. Harris pointed to one song in particular that nearly brought tears to her eyes. She said it was so good that it almost wasn’t fair.

Emmylou Harris said a Dolly Parton song nearly made her weep

In the early days of Parton’s career, Harris spent so much time publicly praising her that Parton joked she should pay her for the good press. 

“I just think she’s a marvelous writer,” Harris said in the book Dolly by Alanna Nash. “I mean, if nothing else, she’s a marvelous writer, and an incredible singer, but then she’s also amazing because of the way she can keep all these aspects of her life together and follow her career. Just to know someone like that is very inspiring. It really is. There are very few people who come close to her as a song craftsman.”

Harrison pointed to one song in particular that she thought demonstrated Parton’s prowess as an artist.

“I mean, a song like ‘To Daddy’ has such a punch line that you want to say, ‘Hey, that’s not fair! You just set me up and knocked me over with that one.’ To me, it’s like an O. Henry short story,” she said. “She sets you up and then whammo — she turns it all around. When I first heard it my lips were trembling and I was afraid I was gonna make a scene.”

Dolly Parton was a major inspiration for Emmylou Harris

When Harris first discovered Parton’s music, she threw herself into her discography. She saw Parton as a major inspiration on her own style.

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“I heard her years ago, when I was only into country music a little bit — before I went over the deep end — and I was amazed at her voice,” she said. “The first time I heard it, I said, ‘Who is that?’ I immediately went out and bought everything of hers I could find. As a singer, I could appreciate her voice and her style, and I did some of her material.”

Harris covered “To Daddy” in 1978.

They worked together on two albums

Parton, Harris, and Linda Ronstadt grew friendly and the latter two appeared on Parton’s variety show in 1976. They sang several songs together, which made them realize they had to collaborate on an album.

“It was a forerunner of our Trio album, something else I will always be proud of,” Parton wrote in her book Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business. “The way that Emmylou Harris, Linda Ronstadt, and I had blended so beautifully on that little local show made it seem obvious to me that the three of us should do an album together. We all thought so and tried to coordinate everything to do just that, several years before the Trio album actually happened, but it didn’t work out at that time.”

They released Trio in 1987 and Trio II in 1989.

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