When Dolly Parton joined Porter Wagoner’s show, he began to instruct her on how to behave in the entertainment industry. It was his show, and he saw her as his student. Wagoner told Parton that he wanted her to talk a certain way. He didn’t want her to sound as though she was overly educated.
Porter Wagoner instructed Dolly Parton on how to sound on his show
Wagoner had been in show business for a long time when Parton joined his show. While she had been pursuing music since childhood, she didn’t have as much experience as him. He gave her pointers and critiqued her performances. Wagoner said Parton liked to receive guidance from him “because she realized I knew how to do things, and she knew I wouldn’t tell her wrong.”
One of his tips was to speak in the same way she would to a friend or family member in Tennessee. He thought speaking in a pretentious or affected way would alienate their audience.
“Don’t try to flower it up and talk like you’re so well educated that you wouldn’t use ‘ain’t’ in a sentence,” he said, per the book Smart Blonde by Stephen Miller. “Cause, hell, you use ‘ain’t’ every other word up in them mountains of East Tennessee, same as we do in Missouri. People want you to be honest with ’em …”
Dolly Parton thought Porter Wagoner was too controlling
While Parton may have been appreciative of Wagoner’s guidance at first, she grew to resent it. She felt he stifled her career growth. Her guitarist, Tom Rutledge, said the dynamic clearly weighed on Parton.
“Four years ago, Porter was controlling Dolly’s whole career, determining what was recorded and what wasn’t, how it was recorded. It’s incredible,” he said in the book Dolly by Alanna Nash. “That whole thing with Porter is a can of worms. The whole last three or four years were bad for Dolly. It was just a high-pressured gig for the people who worked for him, and a real depressing situation for Dolly.”
After she and Wagoner parted ways, Parton said the only way she’d work with him again was if she had more creative control.
“I would if we could come to some sort of agreement on how we would do it and where we both had control of what we were doing,” she said per the book Dolly on Dolly, adding, “I wouldn’t want to just go in and do it again with just Porter and get back in the same situations that we had.”
She said she disliked school
Long before Parton met Wagoner, she was in school in Tennessee. She said she was far more focused on her future than her studies.
“Boy, I did not like school,” she wrote in her book Dream More. “I guess a lot of kids feel the same way. I’m still not sure what I learned in school, except that boys were a distraction. They still are. (Hey, I’m married, not blind!) Plus, it’s hard to concentrate on history when you’re dreaming about performing at the Grand Ole Opry.”
She said she would have dropped out before she graduated if it wasn’t for her father.
“It was always my dream that when I graduated from high school that I was going to move to Nashville,” wrote Parton in her book Songteller: My Life in Lyrics. “My daddy wouldn’t have let me go before then anyway. He’d have sent a posse after me if I had left home. So I stayed in school, even though I didn’t like it.”
