Dolly Parton and Porter Wagoner spent years working together. Their partnership brought increased public exposure to Parton and a fresh new voice to Wagoner’s show. Her presence in Wagoner’s life also inspired him to start writing again. Before he began working with Parton, he hadn’t written a song in nearly two decades.
Dolly Parton inspired Porter Wagoner to start writing again
When Parton joined Wagoner’s television show as a singer in 1967, he’d already worked in the music industry for roughly 15 years. He hadn’t written songs in all of this time. His collaboration with Parton inspired him to pick up his pen again.
“The duets inspired Porter so that he began writing again after an eighteen-year hiatus,” wrote Alanna Nash in the book Dolly: The Biography. “The majority of his and Dolly’s duets they wrote themselves. Hal Durham recalls that when other performers ran around backstage visiting before and after their spots on the Opry, Porter and Dolly used every spare moment to write and work on their songs.”
Parton said they wrote some jokes to include in the songs, but much of their rapport was adlibbed.
“When I write funny songs I include some possible ad-libs to use as a starting point,” Parton said. “But most of what we say on record are on-the-spot ad-libs at the session. I’ll throw in something, and Porter will really get me back! 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!”
She spoke about how important writing is to her
While Parton enjoys singing, her biggest love is songwriting. She writes every single day.
“Writing’s just as natural to me as getting up and cooking breakfast,” she told The New York Times. “I ain’t never far away from a pencil and paper or a tape recorder. I write every day, even when I’m on a plane, in the tub, or on the bus. It burns in me. Songwriting is my way of channeling my feelings and my thoughts.”
She focuses so intently on her writing that she’s not aware of anything else happening around her.
“I have been to Dolly’s house when she was writing and I don’t think she would really know I was there,” her designer, Lucy Adams, said. “I wouldn’t mind it because I knew what it was. When she’s writing, she’s living what she does. If she writes a happy song, she’s happy. If she writes a sad song, that’s the sad part of her.”
Porter Wagoner said Dolly Parton needed more than writing skills to achieve success
Wagoner believed his influence on Parton’s career was what helped lift her to success.
“What I did in her career, the production of her records, was develop ideas that came out of my own mind, with extra insertions from her mind, of different things and different other people,” he said. “To me that’s what it’s about; that’s the only way you can make it.”
While she had talent as a writer, he did not think that this was all it took to make it.
“Because you can be the greatest writer in all the world, and unless someone will be interested in what you have and work with you on it to help get it exposed to the public, all you can do is run around saying, ‘I’m the greatest writer in the world.’ So it takes more than ideas.”
