The song Dolly Parton didn’t want to be remembered for: “A million-dollar monkey”
There aren’t many human beings in the music industry who have managed to be as wholesome as Dolly Parton throughout the years.
She never claimed to make the most complex music in the world, but for country music, all she needed was a song in her heart and the ability to make people relate to the kind of stories that she talked about whenever she sang her songs. And even if she had a wealth of great country tunes, she felt that there were certain times when she made songs that shouldn’t have been preserved in history by any stretch.
Then again, all great country artists need a few years before they truly grow as songwriters. Everyone in Nashville is usually looking to match the best singer and the best song, and even if Parton didn’t have the greatest voice on Earth by any stretch, what made all of her songs sound so beautiful is because you believed her every single time that she opened her mouth to sing about someone stealing her man or about saying goodbye to an old flame like on ‘I Will Always Love You’.
Parton wasn’t going to spend the rest of her life under the wing of Porter Wagoner, though, and a lot of her finest songs came from her breaking out of the conventions of what girl singers were supposed to be. ‘Dumb Blonde’ is practically her theme song for the first part of her career, and while ‘Coat of Many Colors’ is still one of her best odes to living with what she had, it’s not like she couldn’t work with the biggest names in Nashville to get the sounds she wanted.
She had already struck up friendships with some of the biggest names in country like Johnny Cash and Porter Wagoner, and while she did have more than a few great songs under her belt, ‘Here You Come Again’ was a musical wrecking ball when she got hold of it. Plenty of other singers have taken swings at this tune, but even if Parton’s version is the sweetest, she never thought she was quite right for the tune.
The melody was perfect, and Parton sings it perfectly well, but she felt that there was no point in trying to live her life behind a song like that, saying, “Well, you see, that was the first thing that I did after I made the change and it was not exactly what I had in mind. But it proved to be the smartest thing. I knew ‘Here You Come Again’ would be a hit song, but I don’t know if I should be identified with it, because it’s so smooth and pop-sounding. That’s such a good song a monkey could have made it a hit. Well, you’re looking at a million-dollar monkey.”
And considering her track record, Parton had a really good point. She wanted to still hold onto her country roots, and since the song would eventually be covered by everyone from Patti Labelle to Katy Perry in the future, it’s not like the song was ever meant to be a pure country affair when it was first written. However, that might be a compliment when you break everything down.
Even when you look at the best songs of all time, most of them should be able to stand on their own without the bells and whistles. If you took out the country instrumentation on Parton’s version, the tune would still hold up as one of the best songs of that decade, and Parton could only hope to bring the same kind of energy that she was known for whenever she opened her mouth to sing it.
In fact, what she’s doing here wasn’t all that different from what people like Johnny Cash would be doing years after the fact when he started covering rock and roll tunes. There was never any reason why country singers couldn’t think outside the box, and even if Parton had a surefire pop hit in front of her, it was her job to bring that sort of homespun energy to it every time she approached it.
