Merle Haggard and Dolly Parton were never a couple, much to his chagrin. Haggard fell hard for Parton after they toured together, and it took him a long time and multiple rejections to get over her. He admitted he believed she might eventually start to reciprocate his feelings and spent all his time thinking about this. As a result, he started to lose his grip on reality.
Merle Haggard fell in love with Dolly Parton
While touring together, Haggard and Parton began to spend increasing amounts of time with each other during their long stretches on the road. He quickly fell for her.
“We’d been booked on several tours together, and because of our love for the business, and what seemed to be our own little mutual admiration society, we began to spend more and more time together on the road,” he wrote in his book Sing Me Back Home: My Story. “If she wasn’t on my bus, then I was on hers. The roads between one date and the next never rolled off so damn fast.”
Haggard felt that he got to know a version of Parton who is not accessible to everyone.
“Dolly Parton is sure not what the public sees — there is just so much more to the lady than that,” he wrote. “I felt almost honored to be in the presence and see the ‘real’ Dolly. I got the feeling she was afraid to show this side of herself to too many people. It was clear that she’d been hurt and betrayed more than once.”
While he noted that many men likely felt the same way, he thought things would be different for him.
He said he started to lose his mind over her
Haggard didn’t keep his feelings to himself. Instead, he professed his love to Parton on more than one occasion. It didn’t go over well, likely because she was married to someone else.
“I’d tell her I loved her but it never seemed to give her any comfort,” he wrote. “Instead, it seemed to disturb her more and more until she began to move away from me. The more she retreated the more I advanced until I was doing crazy, stupid things. I even began to feel I was really losing my grip on everything. I didn’t give a damn. All I could think about was Dolly.”
He tried everything, but he couldn’t stop thinking about her.
“Still, I couldn’t get her off my mind,” he wrote. “I’d see her when I walked out on stage, when I lay down at night, and when I woke up in the morning. I’d try to blot her out of my mind with all the well-known blotters. Nothing worked.”
His efforts to get closer to her only pushed her farther away. Parton repeatedly told Haggard that she was not interested in any kind of romantic relationship with him.
Merle Haggard wrote a song about Dolly Parton
Haggard’s feelings led him to write the song “Always Wanting You” about Parton. When he finished writing it, he called her in the middle of the night, drunk, and insisted that she listen to it. When he finally let go of his unrequited crush, he found all of this highly embarrassing. He didn’t regret the song, though.
“But you know what they say. Life goes on,” he wrote. “Little by little I faced the fact that Dolly really meant it when she said there was no future for us. But hell, what did I care, I still had my music and one of the best danged songs I’d ever written.”
