The one collaboration Dolly Parton wishes “never happened”
Not every rock and roll partnership is meant to go the distance. Two people might have a brilliant way of writing together and complement each other’s strengths perfectly, but if they don’t have the best relationship behind the scenes, it’s easy for them to either implode spectacularly or try their best to make it work by compromising their vision until either of them is happy. Neither choice is optimal, but rarely has it led to people like Dolly Parton wishing that she had never started working with someone in the first place.
Then again, Parton was always the consummate professional whenever she worked on one of her records. There were bound to be a few moments where she had some help or sang duets with the likes of Kenny Rogers, but few artists in the world of country have been able to come off as complete badasses while still being considered one of the most genuinely nice people in the business.
That’s because the ‘Jolene’ singer always stuck to her guns when it came to making her living. She knew that her main strength was being a songwriter, and while she was more than happy to cover any song she connected with, it was a lot better for her to make tunes that she knew embodied everything she stood for.
And she wasn’t afraid to leave a few people in the dust. Getting someone like Elvis Presley covering one of her songs at the height of his career would have been a godsend, but Parton wasn’t simply going to roll over when Colonel Tom Parker insisted that Presley get a cut of ‘I Will Always Love You’. She had her standards, and she knew that she needed to do right by herself by expanding her brand away from Porter Wagoner after a few too many years on his show.
Wagoner may be a country legend in his own right, but it was clear that Parton had grown into an iconic artist herself and would not let someone else run her career anymore. She had finally decided to spread her wings, but that didn’t stop her former business and duet partner from trying to get his hands on many of her tunes in the process.
While leaving was always bound to get ugly, Parton remembered being incredibly disappointed in what Wagoner tried to get out of her when he sued her for millions of dollars, saying, “Porter Wagoner filed a suit against me for approximately three million dollars, claiming he had made me a star and was entitled to a percentage of my career for life. It turned out, well, it was just kind of an embarrassing thing that I wish had never happened. In a way, it was kinda good that it did, but that’s hindsight.”
Then again, it’s hard to judge any decision like that unless it’s in hindsight, and there’s a good chance Parton is thanking her higher power every day for breaking free from him. The last thing anyone wants to do in this industry is find themselves feeling stale, and had Wagoner still been tied to her legacy, there’s a good chance that she wouldn’t have been able to take the chances she did in her later career and blossom into the sensation she is seen to be.
But that doesn’t mean that Parton didn’t have a few fond memories of her time on the show, even telling Don Henley that she loved singing ‘When I Stop Dreaming’ with the former Eagle, because it was one of the tunes that she and Wagoner used to sing. It’s easy to look back and find fond memories, but those are hardly reasons to think that Wagoner should have kept control over Parton for the rest of her life.
