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Dolly Parton and Porter Wagoner’s longtime collaboration imploded after she began to focus on her solo career. While they still worked together for a time after she left The Porter Wagoner Show, their relationship fell apart when she began producing her own music. Wagoner spoke poorly about her in the press and eventually sued her. Parton said she found all of this embarrassing,

Dolly Parton said she found the public fallout with Porter Wagoner embarrassing

Five years after Parton left Wagoner’s show, he sued her for $3 million. They settled out of court.

“Porter Wagoner filed suit against me for approximately three million dollars, claiming he had made me a star and was entitled to a percentage of my career for life,” Parton wrote in her book Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business. “I could have probably won the case in court, but to spare [my husband] Carl and my family the heartache a long bitter court fight would have caused, I agreed to settle out of court for around one million dollars.”

This was frustrating and painful, but also embarrassing. It wasn’t the kind of press coverage Parton wanted for herself. 

“It turned out, well, it was just kind of an embarrassing thing that I wish had never happened,” she said on The Ralph Emery Show, per the book Dolly on Dolly. “In a way, it was kinda good that it did, but that’s hindsight.”

Dolly Parton said she didn’t want to talk much about Porter Wagoner

Parton was not happy with Wagoner after they parted ways. It didn’t help that he publicly disparaged her in the media. Still, she didn’t want to put herself on his level by talking about him in great detail.

“I won’t put myself on his level,” she said. “I will say that it was unfair and untrue and that’s all I’ll say … It kills you when somebody tells things that just aren’t true. It just killed my daddy, it was just so bitter and untrue.”

Parton said this didn’t mean she didn’t have things she could share about him. She just didn’t think it was appropriate to air out their business.

“But I really don’t care to discuss it if you wouldn’t mind,” she said. “I could say a lot of things, but I’m a more considerate person on that level. I don’t think I have to slander people to be accepted.”

She still said she would have recorded with him again

Though Parton felt Wagoner had burned her, she said a reunion wasn’t entirely out of the question. She would record with him again, at least as long as she had more power over their collaboration.

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Dolly Parton Said She Had Too Much ‘Self Respect’ for the Salacious Rumors About Her and Porter Wagoner to Be True

“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, 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.”

While they did not record together again, Parton and Wagoner reconciled before his death in 2007.

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