This is Dolly Parton's America.
I'm Jad Abou Moran.
We are at the second of nine trips into the Dollyverse.
And in this one, I want to tell the story behind the greatest selling song by a female artist of all time.
You probably know the song I'm talking about, but if you don't, I'm not going to tell you.
It's just going to happen organically.
It's going to be beautiful.
But this is a song that hit number one in three consecutive decades.
Think about that. One song just keeps hitting number one over and over.
Well, behind that song are so many stories.
The story of a collaboration, a historic collaboration, and the story of Dolly's grand metamorphosis.
I'm going to sit on this pillow.
That one was better for height.
Oh, can you? Yeah, bring it up.
I'm so little. I don't feel like I'm sitting in the floor.
Maybe not just hers, but so many people.
I talked about it with her back in Nashville in that studio.
My chair's squeaking.
On that squeaky chair.
Claire, we got to this story at like hour three of the interview.
I'd love to ask you about Porter Wagner.
Okay. Now, that's when I needed a whip.
Earlier, we'd been talking about rumors that she carried a gun in her purse.
That's why I had the weapon.
No, well, Porter and I had a love -hate relationship.
It was, you can't even begin to, you could never untangle all of that.
But we're gonna try.
Okay, so it's 1966.
You're 21. Mm -hmm. Who was he at that time?
I mean, for those of us...
Porter Wagoner was and is a legend.
Whoo! Wow. Thank you so much, and welcome, Sir Brando.
In country music. Y 'all come.
Y 'all come. Y 'all come.
Y 'all come. The syndicated TV show has been one of the most popular in country music history.
Porter had the number one syndicated television show at that time.
Pull up a chair and don't even move out of the room for the next 30 minutes.
Thank you. Porter put together a hell of a road show.
Journalist, historian Robert Orman.
When you went to see a Porter Wagoner show, you got a show.
Top -notch comedians, top -notch singers, killer instrumentals, the whole deal.
and consider the fact that CBS presents this program in color this is when the advent of color television was kind of you know taking root in America this is country music singer songwriter Marty Stewart he worked with Porter toward the end of his life produced the last record he ever did Porter Wagner and his band would come on thank you gang for helping me and those pretty costumes.
Bright blues, pinks, purples.
These beautiful costumes that were made by Nudie the rodeo tailor.
Nudie suits, they were called.
The suit itself is about $10 ,000 to $400.
Porter always dressed in rhinestones.
He was a magical character because those rhinestone suits made him twinkle.
But also, he had great records and great songs.
He had a great ear for music.
He had one hit record after another.
Now, Dolly, at this moment...
June 7, 1967. You know, I was a young girl.
I'm 21 years old now, and I've been here three years.
You know, new in Nashville at the time.
I got married a year ago, the 30th of last month, on Memorial Day last year.
She had, as she says in this interview, just gotten married...
And my husband's name is Carl Dean, C -A -R -L -D -E -A -N.
To a guy named Carl, who from that point until now has been seen in public like almost never.
In any case, at this point, 1967.
Dolly was just one of this wave of songwriters who were in Nashville trying to make it.
What percentage ever make it?
Probably 1, 100 to 1%.
That's how one record exec put it at the time.
And I was really having some major hard times.
She's just trying to get by.
She's, like, stealing food scraps in hotel hallways off of deserted room service trays.
This is writer Sarah Smarsh.
Stealing might be the wrong word, I don't know.
Discarded food is how she can't.
That's true that you did that?
Oh, plenty of times.
I would get whatever looked savable.
And then I would get like a jar of mustard and a jar of ketchup.
And you can work wonders with making little soups.
Yeah, she was like struggling those first few years in Nashville.
The real money was in performing your songs, not just writing them.
At the time, as she describes in the interview, she was trying to make it as a performer.
But the label that she was hooked up with, Monument Records, just thought that her voice...
My voice, the people that are familiar with the way I sing, my voice is pitched real high.
They just thought her voice was too high.
And it sounded like people thought it was childish.
So they thought I might have a better chance than rock and roll.
Now, keep in mind, this is the same year that the Beatles released Sergeant Pepper.
So you can hear that the label is trying to kind of shove her that direction.
And it wasn't working out too well.
I've never had a pop hit.
I had a song out called Happy Happy Birthday Baby that was the best thing I'd had, and it wasn't even considered a hit at all.
But then, right before she did this interview in 1967, in fact, I think it was the reason for the interview.
Her big break comes, and she had a new single called Dumb Blonde.
Dumb Blonde. it's this story where she's it's in the first person she's telling a man to shove it rejecting the idea that because of how she looks she is stupid Just because I'm blonde, don't think I'm dumb.
Cause this dumb blonde ain't nobody's fool.
For someone who has arguably been underestimated her whole career, the lyrics are pretty prophetic.
Dumb blonde, which was the biggest record I've ever had.
As myself, it did real well for me.
It wasn't a huge hit, but a couple things happened as a result of dumb blonde.
She performs the song on TV.
And I was right pretty then, even though I was tacky.
And shortly after that TV performance...
She gets a call. From the king of country himself, Porter Wagner.
Yes. And so from what I understand, you run over to his office with your guitar thinking, he must just want me to write a song for his female singer.
Yeah. He had a girl on his show named Norma Jean Beasley.
Pretty Miss Norma Jean!
Who he almost always introduced that exact same way.
Pretty Miss Norma Jean.
Pretty Miss Norma Jean.
She also was a big recording artist. And Norma Jean's whole vibe was very undolly.
Beautiful, talented, but much more conservative, much more modest. They had been working together for years.
Since the start of his show.
I had been sending songs to him and Norma Jean ever since I'd come to Nashville for them to record. So she says when she got to his office, she got out her guitar, sang him a couple of songs that she thought would be great for norma gene but he stops her then he just told me that norma gene she was leaving his show why was she leaving well i don't know their personal story i just know well she the story at that time that she was marrying she was going to marry and move back to oklahoma city the other version that's sometimes told is that he and norma gene had had an affair and things had gotten
complicated he just told me that norma was leaving the show and would I be interested?
As he put it to her, would she be interested in being his new girl singer?
And then he quoted the price.
$60 ,000 a year, more money than she'd ever seen in her life.
I said yes. Before we go further, let me just offer a little bit of context on the job that Dolly was walking into at the time.
There was no such thing as a female headliner.
Women were on the shows as decorative objects, as you know, and here's a little song from our pretty little girl singer.
Not only that, according to Robert Orman, who has written a lot about this.
Executives on Music Row historically have perceived the country music audience to be dominantly female.
Then as now, they perceive the audience to be female and they believe that women don't buy other women.
They thought women only bought male artists?
Correct. People that they could fantasize about.
out. They thought that's what women consumed.
Obviously, he says that is arguable at best. But that is what they thought.
And so the job of the, quote, girl singer was to be sort of a surrogate for that adoring chorus of female fans that were out there that the execs believed were all fantasizing about Porter.
That was Dolly's new job.
And so we started, I started with him, I guess.
what was it 67 66 actually it was on September 5th 1967 and about 4 million people were watching right now I want you to meet the little lady on our show you know Miss Norma Jean that's been with us for many many years had to leave our show because we work so much on the road and do so many TV shows to kind of have a little time at home for our personal life and I looked at it a long time and thought of of many, many folks that we all liked and thought that you would like.
And here's a little gal that I know you're going to really learn to love because she's a fine singer and one of the finest little gals that I've ever met.
Let's give her a great big welcome as she sings a song that she had a big hit on called Dumb Blonde.
She ain't no dumb blonde, though.
Pretty Miss Dolly Parton.
How about it? Dolly makes her first appearance on The Porter Wagner Show wearing a crew cut bright red dress, red lipstick, hair in a beehive.
and I think it's safe to say that first performance didn't go well after she finishes the song that is mighty mighty nice thank you a lot and welcome to the show thank you it's nice to be here she kinda looks like she wants to run off the stage we're gonna really enjoy working with you and you wrote so many fine songs and sang so pretty.
So we'll look forward to having you around a long, long time.
Well, I hope to be, and thank you very much. So when I first started with Porter's show, people were still calling for Norman Jean.
They didn't like me.
Dolly told me, I think her first road date with the Porter Wagner show, she came on stage and they got booed.
Wow. This is Ralph Emery, country music DJ and longtime television host Yes, they booed Dolly It's true When she came off stage, she was crying It was like, it was hard I looked so different than her My voice was so different When Dolly first arrived in Nashville, that was the whole critique God, she's a great writer God, she's beautiful, but she sings so weird she sounds mini mousey how can we capture that on record how can we make that commercial because it was so different different especially from norma jean when you love halfway who had a much lower richer voice they didn't want yeah i mean there
was and norma jean had a huge follow and it was like where's norma jean in fact that first show uh dolly's first performance with Porter after she sang the song dumb blonde we'll be right back in just a minute or so and they cut to commercial you can tell something happened over that commercial break maybe the audience revolted not sure but when they come back from break and remember these shows were live thank you very much for watching that message and uh Porter felt the need to speak directly to the studio audience talking with Dolly Parton a while ago you know and we're talking about Miss Norma Jean being
gone and And you never find anyone to replace someone.
It's someone that actually is a star in their own right.
And she's a wonderful little gal.
He basically says to the audience in this sort of paternal way, I hear you.
I see that you're upset.
But no, we're doing this.
Porter basically had to put his foot down with the fans and go, Look, if she's good enough for me, she's good enough for you.
And basically, you know, made them listen to Dolly.
I sort of love him for that.
Despite everything.
Yeah. So to deal with this backlash, Porter's first move was to shift the format of his show.
Rather than the usual thing of him doing a song and then having the female singer do a song.
In order to establish me because the people weren't responding to me that much. Dolly and I are going to do all duets.
We've got a whole bunch of...
Porter. We started doing duets.
We did a duet called Last Thing on My Mind.
It was shot right to the top.
Everyone we talked to told us that from the very moment they started, those duets Well, that was magic.
It was like Fred and Ginger John and June Tracy and Katherine Hepburn there's just keep going with those kind of people who just clicked We had a great blend in our voices And I love that sound There are two types of harmonies in country and rock, according to Robert Orman.
One is... Take a message to Mary What I would call the Everly Brothers type harmony, which is close harmony, where the two voices are very close together.
You can tell her I had to see And part of what's cool about that style of duetting is that you can't tell the voices apart.
The other type is the Porter Dolly type.
Better spin them wheels and make it on back Where heaven on earth and love is at Like a rolling stone Better move it on home Where they had very, very distinct ranges.
Their voices are not close together at all.
She sings melody, he sings harmony, but the harmony is mixed as hot as the lead vocal is, so it sounds like two lead vocals.
It's interesting, I mean, how you're describing their singing style.
It's sort of perfectly matched for the content of their songs.
Oh, yeah. Their dialogues.
Male -female dialogues.
In which there's some kind of tension between lovers.
It's a little bit creepy, to be honest. You know, he was old enough to be her dad.
Almost exactly twice her age.
She's at once sort of like...
So, sweet country woman, you want to help me do a duet?
Fatherly. Patronizing.
sing, talking about being her lover in a song.
Nonetheless, in terms of the task at hand of introducing Dolly to a new audience, It worked.
It worked. It didn't just work, it killed.
We made history. Together.
Now I want you to meet the beautiful little lady on our show, and she gets more popular, it seems like, each week.
Here's how it went down.
As soon as the duets got going...
That audience did reach out.
They wrote letters.
Thanks for all of the fine cards and letters and things that you have wrote to her.
And lots of letters.
Saying, I think we like her now.
I know she appreciates it.
And as soon as that started happening...
Porter insisted that I be on RCA.
And then he did a whole deal to get me onto RCA.
He moved Dolly over to his label.
They immediately go into the studio, record some duets.
They record her second solo album.
Which he produces, they begin to tour the country Playing about 200 shows a year Doing live TV tapings and after each one It was mandatory that they take their costumes off Get a cup of coffee and gather up in the control room And watch what they had just done Almost as if it were like a game tape from a football game And he told me how much Dolly didn't want to hear herself Or see herself in the beginning I have never liked to hear myself talk I talk.
I've never liked to hear myself sing.
You've never liked to hear yourself sing?
No. And he actually pushed the issue that, no, this is what we do.
That's how you learn.
He was great on camera, had a great smile.
He knew how to talk to that audience.
I learned a lot. She says from those game tape sessions, she learned how to hold herself on stage, how to make eye contact with the camera.
How to kind of communicate with an audience.
Even, like, how to smile when we were, like, doing album covers or doing pictures.
Now, as Dolly was learning the ropes, I think it's worth saying that country music, around this time, was undergoing a dramatic change.
I mean, it started as this mostly southern phenomenon, but during those years that Dolly and Porter were working together, there was a huge migration of people out of the rural south into the northeast, midwest, west, into urban areas, and they took country music with them.
Country music is getting bigger and bigger these days.
In 1961, 80 radio stations across the nation were called country music stations.
Well, today that number is over 1 ,000.
The point is, as Dolly was being introduced to the world, that world was expanding.
And in fact, in 1967 -68, the country music industry was like, we're getting so big that we need our own awards show.
And in October of 68, From the home of the world -renowned Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, Tennessee, At the second ever Country Music Awards...
Vocal group of the year, Porter Wagner and Dolly Park.
Porter and Dolly win vocal group of the year.
Two years later... Porter Wagner and Dolly Park.
They win it again the next year, too, and by 1972...
Here's the top singing duo in the country music field.
Ladies and gentlemen, Porter Wagner and Dolly Park.
It's just clear that in this new kingdom of country music, they are the royal couple.
And by the way, at every award they win, they walk up there together, his arm draped around her.
He accepts the award. Thank you, everyone, very much. This year, there were so many great duet teams. And Dolly doesn't speak.
Thank you. God bless you.
Producer Shimoliyai asked Dolly about this.
We're very, like, quiet at first. Well, I had to be quiet around Porter, because Porter was a star.
I wasn't allowed to say a lot or I didn't think that it was my place to try to take within his show.
It wasn't really something I would just stand out and do.
That's just not, you didn't do that as a woman and you didn't do that as a professional person.
And it was his show, not mine.
Till I went out on my own, till I could say, till I claimed and owned myself.
Now, speaking of claiming and owning oneself.
self. There are a million moments that you can point to where Dolly did that, but one in particular that came up a bunch of times in our interviews happened in 1970.
Dolly and Porter had been together for three years.
They'd released five albums of duets together.
Porter had released eight solo albums and produced all four of her solo albums, most of which were those slow, mournful ballads that we talked about.
And one time we're on the bus.
This is Buck Trent.
He He played banjo in Porter's band.
On tour, and Porter said, Dolly, you need to write some up -tempo songs for the show.
As in, enough sad -ass songs.
And just off the top of my head, for some reason, I'll see what I can play, yeah.
I said, how about the Muse Skinner Blues?
He said, well, hey, we may try that.
So we get in the studio.
Norma, I mean Dolly was just killing the song.
Porter had the whip.
I mean a real whip in the studio and he's popping the whip.
It is cooking, it is cooking It's got one of the best rhythm tracks of all time And it was a big hit First of all, Buck Trent is right The song is Dolly's first Top 5 hit It got to number 3 Second Second, this song is just fire.
It's just fire. It's so good.
And third, many dollyologists like Jocelyn Neal, professor of music at the University of North Carolina, will tell you that this song marks a turning point.
So the singles that she releases before Mule Skinner Blues are from the voice of little girls.
They are fragile and they are all these perspectives of vulnerability.
I mean, Daddy, come and get me.
My man has put me in a mental institution is not a position of social power.
But after Muleskinner, she says, her songs are totally different.
Rhythmic, percussive, and then the rest, as you get to tell in your podcast, is history.
We'll tell the rest of that history after the break.
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This is Dolly Barnes America.
I'm Jada Boomerod. Let's pick back up with the story.
Let's sing. Anything you want to it, this is your show.
Well, we're going to do Milwaukee.
We talked about Mule Skinner, big moment, around this time, a couple things start to happen.
Well, I'm going to get on O -Turn Park and I'm going to fly Personality -wise I've gotten one, gotten up here Excuse me, I thought it was really on my show On the TV, you begin to see a different Dolly emerge, sort of the Dolly we know You better shape up some Not the quote -unquote shy one Well, the whole part about being shy, I mean, she's the kind of person that hits me The minute she was born, she shook hands with the doctor, signed an autograph, and started dancing for me I was basically, you know, kind of holding back in the early days.
After Muleskinner, she kind of stops doing that.
The second thing that happens around this moment is that behind the scenes, Dolly is writing songs at a blistering pace.
If you look at her discography, 69, 70, 71, 72, it's just one song after another after another.
other there's joshua her first number one coat of many colors my blue tears touch your woman daddy was an old -time preacher man one of porter's best songwriters mel tillis was quoted as saying he couldn't keep up like he would submit one song and she would submit three i mean we're going down the road on the bus and she's writing jolene and i'll always love you in no time at all i remember Remember her scribbling?
She wrote one of her songs, I can't remember which one right now, on one of my dad's dry cleaner tickets.
This is Debra Wagner, Porter Wagner's daughter.
She grabbed that off of that rhinestone suit where he had the plastic with the ticket on it for the dry cleaning.
Matchbox, Candy Bar Wrapper, Napkins at restaurants.
I've seen her do, I saw her do that.
All these songs. All these songs.
songs. Well, I was so excited and everybody was paying attention to me as a writer and that inspired me.
So I wanted to really, really do more because I saw that people were paying attention.
But during that time, my husband, Carl and I had bought our first house and there was a den and a big fireplace.
And I remember I wrote Jolene and I Will Always Love You the same night when we found a tape.
I don't know if the same night, but it was on the same cassette that we found.
I thought So that must have been a really good night.
So I just would sit for hours in that little room and write songs and play.
As she was telling me this, I was reminded of something that journalist Robert Orman had told us on the phone.
If she had been born in a different era, she's Mozart.
She was touched by something.
Love is like a butterfly, I wrote during that same period of time as well.
All right. Let's go to 1973.
Okay. October 31st of that year.
I know you write all kinds of songs and all types of songs, and I think this is possibly the most different tune and sort of the different sound of any of the songs that you've ever written.
Dolly debuts her new song on The Porter Wagner Show.
Well, it is kind of different.
It kind of makes you think of an old folk song that's kind of got a little heavier, up -to -date beat.
I think you'll really like this.
Listen close to it.
It's called Jolene.
Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene I'm begging of you, please don't take my man Jolene Starting in 1973 with Jolene Jolene Dolly would churn out four consecutive number ones in roughly a year.
During that time, Porter's solo stuff was hovering around the 40s.
You have to appreciate also the threat to his ego that she represented by this point, because at this period in time, his era on the charts, his time was getting to be up.
I started getting real big.
Her star was shooting and his was sinking.
And Porter was having a lot of problems with that.
Dolly told me that when it came time for them to record Jolene in the studio, Porter wouldn't let her play the guitar.
He wanted to impress the musicians with that lick.
And so I remember Porter trying to teach it to the guitar players on that session, and it was not coming out right at all.
And I remember I was just getting more upset and more upset, so I remember just getting the guitar from Porter and said, let me just show them the lick.
You write in your autobiography that the bigger you got, the more threatened he got.
Yeah, well, that's natural, because it was his show.
When it got to where I was wanting to have other producers, I wanted to expand.
I wanted to have crossover records, and I wanted to have management where I could do other, you know.
And I told him, I said, if you'll let me, I can stay in the show if you'll let me have my own things.
We can still work within the show.
Let me get a manager and a producer to do some other things outside of what we're doing.
And I'm not trying to take anything from you or me.
I'm just wanting to expand.
If I can do some things, if you'll let me do some stuff within the show, we can still salvage this, and it'll just make your show bigger.
And it'll make us bigger and better.
He couldn't handle it, though.
And I understand that.
Why? Why would you understand that?
Well, I can't speak for him.
Yeah. I'm speaking for me.
You're not talking to Porter.
You're talking to me.
Of course. Of course.
But it's the understanding that I guess I'm asking a question about.
This is a guy, I mean, you see it in the videos, too.
He's got his arm around you.
There's a power thing happening, for sure.
Well, it's more complicated than that.
It's just, I mean, just think about it.
He had had this show for years.
He didn't need me to have his hit show.
He wasn't expecting me to be all that I was, either.
either. When he hired me as a singer, he was just hiring what he thought was a right pretty little girl.
But I was a serious writer.
He didn't know that.
I was a serious entertainer.
He didn't know that.
I mean, he didn't know how many dreams I had.
It was just one of those relationships where you hated them one day, you loved them the next, and it just got so intermingled and so wadded up that you don't, you don't even know what your real feelings were.
I don't know. It was almost, It was just crazy.
It was like a marriage of a sort.
You couldn't even begin to describe it all.
Throughout the years, people have speculated that there might have been more going on between them behind the scenes.
Well, probably. Probably.
You never knew much, but probably.
Even members of the band wondered.
Is Porter running around with Dolly or is he having an affair with Dolly Parton?
This is Porter on The Ralph Emery Show.
Well, would you care to speak to that?
Ha ha! There's so many answers to that, Ralph.
You know, really, there's probably about as many answers as there are people asking questions about that.
Any relationship is like a house with an upstairs.
It's got two stories.
And this is how Dolly addressed those rumors in her autobiography.
I know that everybody that knows anything about me and Porter would like to know the true story of what happened to us.
Nobody would like to know that more than me and Porter.
In any case, this next part, this is the point in the story where you can tell it several different ways.
For writer Sarah Smarsh.
It sounds very much like an abusive relationship.
This is a classic abuse story.
She says, if you scroll through their YouTube performances from 1973, 74, this is when Dolly and Porter had been working together for about seven years.
You see these moments.
There's this moment where she's got her guitar.
He's going to play on their next duet.
So he's sort of suggesting, like, why don't you drop your guitar away?
because now as the man, I'm going to be the one strumming the strings.
And she's like, I'll just hang on to it.
I'll just hold on to it.
I need a security blanket.
Like, nope, I'm good, you son of a bitch, you know.
Sarah points to another moment, same episode.
Sang one of her great songs.
Portis doing an intro, Dolly's off screen.
She probably knows Bill Cheatham.
And she sort of butts in with a joke.
I don't know no Bill Cheatham.
Shut up. He tells her to shut up.
And his face definitely falls for a moment.
microexpression, rage.
We're back again. Me and my sidekick here.
She just kicked me in the side.
Not yet, but I think I will after this.
If you ever hit me and I find it out, Dolly Parton, you'll be in trouble.
He just makes these casual jokes about physically harming her.
I ought to box your jaws.
Oh, you'd hit your mama before you hit me.
And that reminded me of the statistics that tell us that when a woman is about to leave an abusive relationship that that is when violence escalates is that you guys doing a shtick or is that actual hostility oh way too many things to ever untangle all of that you and me cannot agree cause our love's a fighting kind now to be clear i don't think there's anything here that would suggest actual physical abuse happened but clearly they went at each other in every other other way we just did not we just went like that you know i was so stubborn and he's so definite in who he is well the thing about porter
and this is this is where you hit humanity is that the times you know and so many country singers had the pretty little girl singer on their show around nashville and they were kind of lord and master and whatever they say went if you work for me you're gonna do what i say or you're not going to work for me right right this is porter being interviewed by herb sudson on his show sudson country i'm not hiring an advisor to come in that's right i'm hiring someone to work for me i signed the check i pay them because i love dolly she's a beautiful lady in every respect but it don't matter if my mama is working
on my show mama's gonna do what porter says and uh there was no questions asked well anybody that knows anything about her knows that that ain't how it works with her.
He would say, this is my damn show.
I say, no, but this is my damn life.
And we're not talking about the show.
I'm talking about my life.
I'm talking about my future.
I can't stay here as the girl singer forever.
I want an individual career.
I am my own self. I didn't come to Nashville to be just part of a duet and to be a girl singer in somebody's group.
I want my own band.
I want my own show.
I want my own dreams. I want my own.
But it was like, well, I made you.
And I said, well, yeah, you've made me mad again.
You've made me a lot of things.
And I'm not taking anything from you, I would say.
I appreciate everything you've done, but I never promised you forever.
And we just were not happy.
Either of us were not happy.
Was there a breaking point that you can recall?
call yeah i just finally just thought i'm gonna break myself if i don't go because all we were doing was fighting and it just wasn't working i couldn't even i couldn't think i couldn't sleep i couldn't eat and he wasn't happy either and i thought this is just insane we've got to do something so that's when i went in and said you know i thought well he's not gonna listen we'd had fought and I'd go home crying.
And so that's when I wrote I Will Always Love You and went back to sing it.
Story goes, as every Dolly fan knows, she walked right into his office, told him to sit down and she just sang it to him.
If I should stay, I would only be in your way.
So I'll go, but I know I'll think of you each step of the way.
And I will always love you I will always love you And so he was sitting in the chair and he started crying out.
And then he said, well, that's the best song you ever wrote.
I said, well, you inspired it.
He said, well, I guess you can go if I can produce the record. I said, OK, you can.
My father, she had to stand up to him like a lot of us women do to get our way.
She left an influence on me to speak your mind.
And if you're hurting, let others know.
And if you're loving, let them know that too.
Deborah Wagner says she was inspired by what Dolly did, even though it was her father on the other end of it.
And it's interesting to consider that this was a moment in America when the divorce rate was doubling.
When you had all of these no -fault divorce laws popping up all around the country.
This was a moment when women could finally leave. She describes it as like, I mean, honestly, I was previously married.
And when I initiated a divorce, the way that she talks about that moment, again, this is not to suggest they had a romantic relationship, but that there was some sort of like this almost spiritual tether between them that she was deciding for her own survival she was going to leave. And she describes it in terms that I was like, oh, I remember that feeling.
This is from her autobiography.
As I left his office and began to drive toward my home out in Brentwood, it began to rain.
So did I. I cried. Not so much out of a sense of loss, but from the pain that almost always comes with change.
It has a sad kind of freedom.
Then I began to sing a song to myself It's been a long dark night And I've been waiting for the morning It's been a long hard fight But I see a brand new day a dawning I've been looking for the sunshine I ain't seen it in so long Everything's gonna work out just fine Everything's gonna be all right It's been all wrong I can see the light of a clear blue morning and i swear to you on my life as i said that the sky cleared up it stopped raining the sun came out and before i got home i had completely written the song called light of a clear blue morning it was like god saying okay you're free to
go now so just make the most of it yeah that was my first song of my freedom it's amazing to me that even in that moment it becomes a song almost immediately well that's how i do things that's how i deal with my hurt s reporter he went and spent six weeks sitting by a lake by himself well i think when dolly left and you know at so many levels i have no doubt in my mind that dolly was the love of porter's life uh she's irreplaceable don warden was irreplaceable don warden by the way was porter's right hand man he was my dad's best friend.
He was the man in the music business my dad trusted the very most. He would also leave and go with Dolly.
Key musician in the band named Buck Trent, who was kind of the band leader, he left and went with Roy Clark's show.
And so Porter was just kind of capsized after all those years of being the king.
And I think his ego was bruised.
I think his heart was broke.
So he basically then went on a public spree of character defamation.
To me, Dolly Parton is the kind of person that I would never trust with anything of mine.
I mean, her family, her own blood.
She would turn her back on to help herself.
Telling anyone who would listen that Dolly Parton was a horrible person who he wouldn't trust further than he could throw.
I don't care about talking about it because most people would think I'm bitter, you know, at Dolly.
I'm not bitter at her at all.
Dolly wants to do everything that is possible for her.
She lives in a fairy land.
Anyhow, I left, and Porter sued me for a million dollars.
He sued you for a million dollars?
Because, see, we didn't really, I didn't.
And he sued me because of what I had done to his show.
I don't remember exactly what all the legalities were.
But he thought he was my manager.
He was suing me for future royalties because I had signed, I don't even know what all.
I was young and silly.
Porter in court would claim that Dolly was the reason he canceled his roadshow.
He would claim, and this is true, that they had signed a contract saying that if she left his show, he was entitled to a percentage of her earnings, that if she left his show, he was entitled to manage her for five years, and that during that time, she couldn't enter into any contract concerning her musical career without his written approval.
He claimed that she was now trying to minimize his stake in their production company that they own together.
In fact, he would claim in court that Dolly broke into the offices of that production company, stole 130 demos of music.
These are demos that mostly she had written, but she stole them.
And now she was off making albums with some of those songs and he was entitled to some of that money.
And so he sued me. Dolly decided to settle.
I didn't have a million dollars.
Took me years to pay him back.
Wow. He just did that out of anger, though, I think.
She doesn't like to dwell on this particular chapter.
And neither, apparently, does anyone else in Nashville.
I think everybody in this town understands the art of a good hillbilly divorce.
So you don't pick sides.
You love everybody and just listen.
That has always been.
But I know it must have been awful for both of them.
But as years went by, we made up.
Later he said that was the worst thing I've ever done.
I'm so sorry I did that.
He told me that. He said I just was, you know, hurt and angry.
What I find most amazing about this story is how it ends.
Like we've all seen so many bad divorces, right?
The good thing about a divorce is that unhappy people can walk away from an unhappy thing.
But so often that's not what happens.
People get stuck in the ugly part.
But not here. Here, Dolly pays him the million dollars over time.
Then in 1981, Porter gets dropped from his label, RCA.
And then Dolly hears that he's made some bad investments and the IRS has come after him, saying that he owes them half a million dollars.
He did fall on hard times and he needed the money.
And at that time, I had money.
And so Porter had started writing after I was writing a lot.
Porter had never written before.
And so he started writing.
He wrote some really good songs, too.
and so after he was having some hard times i thought well a good way for me to do that is just to um to buy the publishing company so i bought it and then i just gave it back to him because i wanted his kids to have it i didn't want it wow but that was my gift one of my gifts for thanking him too because see i never knew how do you ever know how to thank somebody or what you owe somebody somebody, because who knows, had it not been for Porter, I may not be sitting right here in this chair right now, because that was, you know, I'd like to believe I would have made it, but because I felt bad that I
had to go, but I knew I had to go, or I was stifled, and by that time I would just, if I'd have stayed forever, I might have missed my chance, and God was telling me to go.
That spirit of mine was saying, go, you've got to go, you've got to go.
At that time, it's not like like putting flowers on me.
It was the least that I could do.
I felt like it was all right.
That was to me the thing to do.
And so I was glad to do it.
It made me feel better about everything else.
I have a theory that one of the reasons that you can have the crazy broad appeal that you have into so many different communities that normally hate each other is because of those acts of forgiveness.
Does that vibe with you?
Yeah, forgiveness. Forgiveness is all there is.
Porter Wagner died on October 28, 2007, in a hospice facility in Nashville.
And I do know for a fact, and this tells it all right here, that one of the last people he saw on this earth was a girl named Dolly.
And she was there holding his hand by his bed and, you know, giving him water.
When you saw him a few hours before he died, what did you speak about?
Well, I asked everybody to go out and I just talked to him myself.
Porter was not, I knew he could hear me, but he was not able to talk to me.
But I could tell and he could touch my hand and squeeze a little bit.
And I just told him that I loved him and I appreciated him.
And I said I was sorry for all the things we had been through.
and I was so happy that we had become friends again and that I would always remember and treasure him.
You know, we had a special bond and I was happy that I was there.
Dolly Parton's America was produced and written and edited by me and Shima Oliai, brought to you by Awesome Audio.
That's OSM Audio and WNYC Studios.
We had production help from W.
Harry Fortuna, original music from Nathan Faye, Courtney Hartman, Steph Jenkins and Stephanie Coleman.
Thanks to the folks at Sony Music, the Country Music Association the team at the Country Music Hall of Fame Herb Sutsen, Harry Willen from the documentary National Sound and the Everett Corbin Collection at the Center for Popular Music.
Special thanks to Peter at HarperCollins, Lynn Sacco Danny Nazell, David Dotson, Sam Haskell, Teresa Hughes, Pat Walters, Lou Miller, Susie Lechtenberg and Soren Wheeler and as always, thank you to my dad Add more from him, come soon.
We have partnered with Apple Music to bring you companion playlists to each of the episodes.
We're updating it every week.
You can find that at dollypartonsamerica .org.
Before we go, one more word on that song.
It has been called the love song of the century.
You know, you see this song being performed on...
Idol and The Voice and all this.
It's one of the go -to songs, and if somebody performs the song even half decently, the crowd goes crazy.
Because when it gets to that big part, and if the singer can just even barely make that big part, they're going to get a round of applause.
We call the boom -a -die moment.
Boom and I. It's the boom and I moment, right?
This is David Foster.
He is one of the main reasons that I Will Always Love You became the love song of the century.
I was the lucky guy that got to produce I Will Always Love You for Whitney Houston and the Bodyguard. He spoke with producer Shimoli Ai.
Yes. She's going to take us out with this brief story of an encounter between David, Dolly, Whitney, and Glory.
So here's how it went down.
it's 1991 they're making the movie i've been watching you all night from across the room why don't you go back there keep watching that's kevin costner he and whitney houston star in the movie as i'm sure you know kevin costner actually produced the movie so he asked david to jump on board to create the soundtrack so david had to write all these songs for different scenes for whitney to sing but the finale song had not been decided so they do a search one other song comes up.
They record it. It doesn't quite work.
They find another song.
It's not nothing's working.
It's actually Kevin Costner.
The hero that he is calls up David Foster and goes, David, I have an idea.
Yeah. Side note. Do you are you still in contact with Kevin Costner by any chance?
It's funny that you should say that because I called him yesterday.
Oh, no way. You You know, Kevin was so musical.
Let me be the name you whisper He has a band, he plays, he sings.
He loves country music, he loves country rock.
Anyway, he calls David and he says, you know that scene we're going to do at the end of the movie, the big scene with Whitney?
I think I have the perfect song.
He did. He said, I've got it.
I want to do this song, I Will Always Love You.
And you'll do the big version at the end and it'll be great.
And I think that I pretended that I knew the song but I'd never heard that song before.
So I sent somebody down to the record store in Malibu, and the only version they could find was Linda Ronstadt's version.
1975. I knew immediately that I could kill this song.
And when you see it in the movie, she's getting on the plane and then she stops and she comes back out and hugs him.
And you know they're in love, but they're never going to be together.
Such a good scene. Anyway, Whitney, Kevin, David, they go to shoot the scene We were recording the song live Because the director wanted that live feeling Is it that scene where Whitney's on stage in that hotel?
Yes And at what point did you tell Dolly that you were gonna do her song?
I clearly remember going back to my room Back to his hotel room, he calls Dolly He's all excited And she was like, oh, that's great news I love Whitney, you know She said, I can't wait to hear her sing that part You know, the third verse And I'm going like, third verse?
There's no third verse in this song.
Now the third verse, it's the one where she talks.
I hope life treats you kind.
Directly to Porter.
And I hope that you have all that you ever dreamed of.
Dolly was like, no, you have to do the third verse.
The third verse has everything in it.
It's the wrap up of the whole song.
It's the most meaningful lyric.
Oh, no. Yeah. Linda Ronstadt had not done the third verse.
I've got to go back and listen to that Linda Ronstadt version and make sure that I'm right.
Can you play it? Yeah, I think I can play it.
I mean, like move in like one minute?
Yeah, yeah, I'm going to, I'm skipping this ad.
You don't pay for your YouTube?
I'm going to play it for both of us.
Oh, I don't hear the third one.
They're playing it instrumentally.
Oh, yeah, you are so right.
David now what happens a chorus comes in yep now the chorus no third verse so he's like damn it Linda gets off the phone with Dolly runs back to where they're shooting the scene and says guys we gotta do the third verse the porter verse you just like gave Whitney the lyrics we gotta do this third verse we had to go back in and record it again and I wish you joy that's my favorite part of the song joy did you have any idea of the worldwide impact that it's still the number one recorded song by a female artist of all time No, in fact, I didn't even know that stat.
But I was standing there when she was singing it and her mom walked over to me.
She said, you're witnessing greatness right now.
Then she walked away.
You know how you talked about how Dolly paid a million dollars to Porter?
In one year of the release of this song, she reportedly made three times that.
And she's thanked me more than once, you know, making jokes about it.
She bought me my house here and got me my this there.
memories Dolly, if you're listening to this, this is David Foster.
Please make the time to have lunch with me sometime.
On the next episode of Dolly Parton's America.
No! Shut up. No! Are you going to take us?
Do you want to go? Oh my God, yes!
Oh my God, fire! We pilgrimage to Dollywood and end up in a Tennessee mountain time warp.
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