Dolly Parton Said Her Flirty Banter With Porter Wagoner Flowed Without Any Effort
In the years Dolly Parton and Porter Wagoner worked together, she likely spent more time with him than any other person. Though their relationship was rocky behind the scenes, they had undeniable chemistry as performers. Parton said she rarely had to pre-write their banter on records. It flowed easily between them.
Dolly Parton said it was easy to ad lib with Porter Wagoner
On some of Parton and Wagoner’s more humorous songs, they bantered back and forth on the recordings. While Parton wrote some of this in advance as a starting point, she said she didn’t necessarily need to.
“When I write funny songs I include some possible ad-libs to use as a starting point,” she said, per the book Dolly: The Biography by Alanna Nash. “But most of what we say on record are on-the-spot ad-libs at the session.”
They had strong chemistry and were able to joke without much effort.
“I’ll throw in something, and Porter will really get me back!” she said. “We can always make a comeback no matter what gets said first. And it’ll usually be funny, because it’ll be natural, just like somebody really fighting!”
The ease of their banter led many fans to believe that they were romantically involved.
She said their relationship was difficult despite their chemistry
While they had chemistry on the records, Parton and Wagoner were often at odds.
“[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.”
It became too much to handle, and Parton eventually left Wagoner’s show.
“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,” she said. “And like I say, it was a relationship that would be very hard to explain.”
Some people believed Porter Wagoner was in love with Dolly Parton
When Parton left Wagoner’s show and began producing her own records, Wagoner felt devastated. Some believed that this was because his feelings for Parton were more than professional.
“The main reason Dolly had such a hard time disentangling herself from Porter is because he was in love with her,” a journalist said. “Porter was really torn up over losing Dolly. Really torn up. Because he really did love her, and I don’t think he’d ever been in love with anyone but himself. And about Carl Dean, well, you know Porter was the main man in Dolly’s life all the years she was with him.”
Parton acknowledged that this might be the case, but said she did not reciprocate the feeling.
“Maybe he was in love with me,” she said. “But it was a love of its kind. It was not a love that could ever be shared, if he was.”
