Credit: Far Out / Matthew Barnes / Blue Eye Records / Sugar Hill Records / Library Of Congress
Sun 10 May 2026 16:00, UK
Dolly Parton wasn’t the kind of artist that dwelled on the negative aspects of the music business.
It can be a cutthroat industry, and there have been many times where Parton has been stuck with tunes that she didn’t want to make, but she figured that she wa better off focusing on the positives than worrying about the worst records that she ever made or the more embarrassing pieces of her discography. She knew that it was better to focus on what made her happy, but that also meant cutting herself loose from people that didn’t have the same interests that she had when she started.
She said right at the top of her career that she was no dumb blonde, and the rest of her career was her willingness to fight for everything, even if it meant getting a little bit nasty. There were bound to be a few pieces of her career that didn’t work out like her back-and-forth with Linda Ronstadt in the 1990s, but usually there was a moment where she could find time to hash things out with even her biggest adversaries when she wanted to.
But the Nashville machine usually doesn’t take to mavericks like Parton who want to do their own thing. She was always convinced that she was going to make the best music that anyone had ever heard, but sometimes that clashed with what the bogstandard formula was on Music Row. It wasn’t about making her brand of music, and since she had begun her career working with Porter Wagoner, there was always a sense of loyalty that she needed to have towards the one who first gave her a shot.
That might have worked for a couple of years, but Parton wasn’t going to sit around and watch someone else dictate her career for her. She wanted to go off on her own and make music that didn’t need his voice behind everything, and even if it would have meant ruffling some feathers, that’s what Parton was going to do if she could be happy with writing her own songs and having a career of her own.
It was nothing personal towards Wagoner, but after one too many fights with him over her creative direction, she figured that she was better off betting on herself, saying, “We had a lot of duets together, but we were like oil and water, so to speak. I never really figured out, if we were so much alike we couldn’t get along, or that [it was because] we were so different. He had his dreams and I had mine, and I just felt that I had to go, and ‘climbing on that ladder of success,’ as they say, didn’t go over well with him.”
And for a woman getting her start in Nashville, this was a big risk to take. No one would have had the same kind of bravery that Parton had, but she knew that she was coming up with the greatest tunes of her career, and she wasn’t about to let someone else stand beside her and try to take partial credit for what she did. She wanted the chance to fly, and getting over this hurdle was enough to prepare her for what would come later.
Further reading: From The Vault
She may have immortalised her relationship with Wagoner on ‘I Will Always Love You’, but if she could turn him down and still move on in life, she could do the same thing when Elvis Presley’s management tried to come after her copyright. As much as she loved Presley, she wasn’t going to let go of the writing credits to her song for anything, no matter how fat the royalty checks might have been.
There were a lot of people that would have caved under the pressure that Parton was under, but in the music business, all it takes to build up that bravery is to get over that first hurdle, and letting go of Wagoner was one of the biggest blessings she could have asked for when she got ‘Jolene’ on her own. She wanted the opportunity to work on new material, and after knocking it out of the park on her own, there was no limit to what she could do in Nashville.
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