Porter Wagoner Shared Why the Way Dolly Parton Left Him Was ‘so Wrong’
Dolly Parton and Porter Wagoner worked together in the early days of her career. He hired her to sing on his show and they collaborated on multiple albums. As the 1970s wore on, though, Parton began to want to build a solo career. Her decision to leave their partnership greatly wounded Wagoner. He believed that the way she went about leaving him was not right.
Porter Wagoner felt betrayed by Dolly Parton
Even after Parton left Wagoner’s show, they continued to have a working relationship. He produced her albums, at least for a time. As she further honed her solo career, she realized she wanted to be her own producer. She moved forward without Wagoner, which he saw as a major betrayal.
“It was the way the move was done, the manner in which it was done that was so wrong,” he said in the book Dolly by Alanna Nash. “Because at each meeting that we would have with RCA, or with the record execs who were talking about directing Dolly’s career more toward the pop market, I never failed to mention at any time that if the production of her records was short in any way, I would be happy to work with or step aside and let anyone else get involved who they thought was better qualified. And even with this happening, the entire move was done behind my back and with her and RCA.”
He said that working for Parton had harmed his career. He felt he deserved better treatment from her as a result.
“[T]he schedule was so heavy, in having to put time in on her records and our duet records, that I decided to quit the road,” he said. “Had I not been producing Dolly Parton’s records and the duet records, I would not have quit the road, ’cause my schedule would have been loose enough that I coulda done the things they wanted to do. That’s the reason I felt that it was such an underhanded thing to do.”
Dolly Parton felt trapped in her working relationship with Porter Wagoner
Many people surrounding Parton said that Wagoner was an anchor on her career. When she moved on from their working relationship, she was able to build the type of career she had always wanted. She said that she had always wanted to write songs like “Jolene,” but could not while she was with Wagoner.
“That was the first time I noticed people sayin’, ‘That’s different than what you been doin’,’” she said. “But I had been fightin’ for that sort of thing for years. I had all these songs I was writin’, and I was developin’ musically, as far as a different style of pickin’ and hearin’ different sounds in my mind was concerned. ‘Jolene’ was the first good example of the fact that you can be yourself and still improve on whatever you do.”
She wrote ‘I Will Always Love You’ for him
Before Parton moved on from Wagoner as her producer, she had to extricate herself from her role on The Porter Wagoner Show. He did not want her to leave, so she wrote the song “I Will Always Love You” for him.
“[A]ll we were doing was fighting, and it just wasn’t working,” she said on Dolly Parton’s America, adding, “I couldn’t think. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat. He wasn’t happy either. I thought, ‘This is just insane. We’ve got to do something.’ That’s when I went in and said … I thought, ‘He’s not going to listen.’ We’d fought. I’d go home crying. That’s when I wrote ‘I Will Always Love You’ and went back to sing it.”
Wagoner was so moved by the song that he told her she could leave if he could produce the record.
