Dolly Parton Was ‘Miserable’ While Working With Porter Wagoner, Said Her Guitarist
Dolly Parton has spoken diplomatically about her time with Porter Wagoner. While she admitted they fought viciously, she also praised him as an artist and expressed gratitude for him. Her guitarist, however, said Parton wasn’t at all happy behind the scenes. He said she was miserable to be stuck in a partnership with Wagoner.
Dolly Parton’s guitarist said she wasn’t happy while working with Porter Wagoner
Parton has been writing songs since she was a child. She had a heap of ideas about her career, but Wagoner wouldn’t let her implement them. Her guitarist, Tom Rutledge, said this was not easy on Parton.
“Dolly’s music is a very, very personal thing to her,” Rutledge said in the book Dolly: The Biography by Alanna Nash. “It almost kills her to have to record something not the way she wants to record it. And I know that was a big part of her leaving — not to be able to express her music the way she wanted to express it. And I’m sure on stage, too, it was the same way. The way the show was presented was the way Porter said it would be presented. So her whole career was influenced by Porter, and if it wasn’t the way she wanted to do it, she was miserable.”
Rutledge said she had a little more freedom on her album All I Can Do, but Wagoner still produced it.
“She had more freedom on ‘All I Can Do’ than she’d ever had, or at least that’s what she told me,” Rutledge said. “But she had ideas of how she wanted the material recorded, ’cause she’d written it. And Porter had his ideas, because he was the producer. And I guess most of the time he would win out, mostly through intimidation, because of the type of personality he is.”
Dolly Parton said she experienced a lot of pressure while working with Porter Wagoner
The dynamic between Parton and Wagoner led to a great deal of tension. She admitted they fought viciously.
“[A]nytime that you give that much of yourself to somebody and you’re as involved as we were — we experienced the joy and sorrow of all the things,” she said. “We fought in the studio, or at least there was bad times, but we also knew the joy of the same song that we might have fought over when it became a hit. But we didn’t have enough separation, which is why it got to be too much for both of us. Got to be extreme pressure. And like I say, it was a relationship that would be very hard to explain.”
She acknowledged that his feelings could have been more than professional. She didn’t feel the same way, though.
“Maybe he was in love with me,” she says. “But it was a love of its kind. It was not a love that could ever be shared, if he was.”
She wrote ‘I Will Always Love You’ for him
Eventually, Parton realized she had to move on from the partnership. She knew Wagoner wouldn’t let her go easily, 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, moved by the lyrics, said he would let Parton move on as long as he could produce the song.
