The one person Dolly Parton never wanted to talk to again: “In a million years”
It feels like everything isn’t right with the world if Dolly Parton is in a foul mood.
Her entire persona is centred around being one of the most wholesome characters in country music, and even when she has her rough patches, her optimism is the kind of infectious energy that anyone would want to latch onto for a second. Most of us could only hope to be half as happy as Parton seems to be every single day, but there were definitely some people in the music industry who could piss her off every now and again.
For one, anyone who seemed to treat her as less of a genius because she was a woman was clearly delusional to some degree. Not all of her songs needed to be the greatest thing that anyone had ever heard, but after spending too many years with Porter Wagoner, she wasn’t going to sit around and wait for the rest of the world to catch on to what she could do on her own. She was willing to work her ass off for what she wanted, but that also means dealing with some nefarious characters along the way.
She had already gone through the wringer to get out of her contracts with Wagoner, but the idea of her getting sideswiped by Elvis Presley’s management was never going to happen. ‘The King of Rock and Roll’ was used to getting the kinds of songs that he wanted, but Parton wasn’t going to give up the copyright to ‘I Will Always Love You’ if it meant that Presley was going to cover the tune.
It may have been strictly business back then, and Parton certainly knew that, but she was never going to stand for people who were trying to make her look nasty for the hell of it. She wasn’t going to be pushed around and let her name be dragged through the mud, and when Howard Stern started to throw his hat into the ring and started making fun of Parton live on his show, Parton was never going to stand for it.
Then again, talking about Stern making some snide remark in the 2000s would be like saying that water is wet or the sky is blue. Stern would have done anything that he could to get a shock out of his audience, but if there wasn’t a line that he didn’t cross, the idea of framing Parton as a racist bigot when doing an edit of her audiobook version of her autobiography wasn’t something that she was going to take on the chin. Stern didn’t have the right to paint her in that light, and she was happy to put a stop to him any way she could.
She wasn’t going to set the record straight on his show by any means, but she did condemn him in the press when she found out what he was doing, saying, “I have never been so shocked, hurt and humiliated in all my life. I cannot believe what Howard Stern has done to me. In a blue million years, I would never have such vulgar things come out of my mouth. They have done editing or some sort of trickery to make this horrible, horrible thing.”
And when you look at the behaviour that Stern has had since then, he seems to have done a lot of damage control in later years. No one would have imagined that she would have done one of his shows after the fact, but even with over a decade since the controversy, Stern seemed to be open to talking about her status as a living legend when she eventually appeared on his show to promote the album Rockstar.
But even if Stern could have been counted on to make a snide comment more than a few times on his show, he learned one valuable lesson that everyone should learn in the music business. Anyone can say something to get people riled up, but if you try to make the audience choose between you and Dolly Parton, you’re going to lose EVERY SINGLE TIME.
