Dolly Parton and Porter Wagoner spent years working together. She appeared on his television program, they performed together, and they released many duets. As the years wore on, though, she began to feel caged in by her connection to Wagoner. Their split was painful and contentious, but Parton felt it was worth it. She thought she would have lived to regret it if she stayed with Wagoner any longer.
Dolly Parton said she needed to move on from her partnership with Porter Wagoner
Parton made a name for herself alongside Wagoner, but she hoped to set out as a solo artist. With Wagoner, she had little creative control over her career.
“This day and time, you can be what you want to be, especially musically, and if you don’t venture out to try to be what it is you want to be, then you are a fool,” she said in the book Dolly: The Biography by Alanna Nash. “You’ve served no purpose in life; you have failed as a person if you don’t try what your heart says to do. That is, unless there are things bigger that hold you back, like wives and children and husbands and all. But if you do have a chance to do everything you can do and you don’t do it, like I said, you’re a fool.”
She said she didn’t feel entirely stifled, but she struggled to be the artist she knew she could be.
“It wasn’t a matter of holding me back, necessarily, but working in an organization with other people, it’s unfair to try to put your own ideas on somebody who is head of an organization, say like with me and Porter,” she said. “When he was producing me, I got some of my ideas across and the big part of my ideas were written in the songs, you know, the arrangement ideas and all. But there was so much I wanted to do, and he heard it so differently that we just couldn’t agree on so many things: It just took away the joy of me recordin’ the song at all.”
He admitted he liked to do things his way
Wagoner himself admitted that he held the creative control in his partnership with Parton.
“We were gonna do things my way,” he said. “Because that’s the kind of person I am. Dolly Parton’s career up until she left me was done my way. That’s the only way it could be successful operating with me, because if we had done it her way it would not have worked.”
He said he wouldn’t have allowed her songs and arrangements on his show.
“Had we done the songs she would like to have done, the way she would like to have done them, it would not have worked,” he said. “Because I could not produce ’em that way, first of all. I would not allow ’em to be done that way on my show. I signed the checks at that time, so we did things my way, and that was the way I was bom and reared to do—that if you paid a man to work for you, he worked for you; he didn’t tell you what to do. If he did, that would be called an adviser. So I wasn’t looking for an adviser when I hired Dolly.”
Dolly Parton’s friends felt Porter Wagoner was dragging her down
While Parton hesitated to say that Wagoner held her back, those who knew her were a bit more blunt.
“The team was a winner. I don’t know if they’re winners separately or not,” country music comedian Minnie Pearl said. “I’m not sure about him, but she definitely is. She’s a star. A superstar. And she was ready to separate, to split and go out on her own. She would never have been satisfied to have been attached to anything or anybody in the business. It was time to move, and she did.”
Fred Foster first signed Parton when she arrived in Nashville. He thought Parton could have made it without Wagoner.
“I didn’t think she needed The Porter Wagoner Show to do what she wanted to do, and I still don’t think she did,” Foster said. “I’m not here to attack Porter Wagoner, either. While I’m sure his show did her good in many areas, I think it also confined her terribly. I think it did her some real damage. She could have made it to where she is right now much sooner without that TV show around. It was more like an anchor.”
