1 of Dolly Parton’s Biggest Hits Was a Songwriting Accident
Dolly Parton takes pride in her songwriting, but she didn’t write one of her greatest hits. In 1977, Parton released “Here You Come Again,” which helped launch her into the mainstream. Parton didn’t initially want the song. The song also didn’t look like the original version of itself. When songwriter Cynthia Weil was working on it, she had to make up lyrics because of an in-studio mistake.
Dolly Parton almost didn’t get one of her career-changing hits
The song “Here You Come Again” opens with the lines, “Here you come again / Just when I’ve begun to get myself together / You waltz right in the door / Just like you’ve done before / And wrap my heart ’round your little finger.”
This was not how the song originally started. Weil accidentally erased the opening lines she’d written with Barry Mann. As a result, she had to make something up.
“I didn’t know what to do, so I made one up,” Weil said, per Songfacts. “I made up the melody and the lyric. When [Mann] came back, I sang it to him. He said, ‘That’s not my opening line, but I like yours better.’ We kept it.”
Parton later took the song and made it a hit.
Dolly Parton worried about the hit before she put it out
When Parton’s manager brought her “Here You Come Again,” she worried that it would alienate her country audience. She didn’t want to put it out as a single.
“I resisted it, saying, ‘I don’t want to scare my audience to death,’” she wrote in her book Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business. “I wanted to put out ‘Two Doors Down’ first. Sandy [Gallin] said, ‘We’ll do it later. This is your first song. It’s going to be a giant hit. You’ve got to trust me sooner or later.’ I trusted him.”
She was right to put her trust in her manager, Sandy Gallin. “Here You Come Again” was the biggest hit of Parton’s career at that point.
“I am very glad. He was right about all of it,” she wrote. “‘Here You Come Again’ was a huge hit, my first million seller. I will always be indebted to Sandy for his vision as well as to Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil for such a great song. Gary Klein did a first-class job of producing the record, and the Scotti brothers did an equally top-notch job promoting it. I had a big hit.”
The song was a crossover success
While Parton had concerns about how her country audiences would react to a pop song, they embraced the song as well. It helped her move from a country singer to a global superstar.
“When ‘Here You Come Again’ was a big hit with country audiences too, I felt completely vindicated,” she wrote. “Not only had I proved I was right about the arithmetic, I helped to make a whole segment of society change the way they thought about country music and country singers. Now Nashville began to respond a little differently to me. When I was nominated by the CMA as Entertainer of the Year, it was a sure sign that Nashville had finally gotten over my crossover.”
She won her first Grammy for the song.
