Dolly Parton Won Over Porter Wagoner With a Song That Showed Her ‘Soul’
Dolly Parton began working with Porter Wagoner in 1967. She’d already been working on music at this point, but the spot on his show lifted her career to new heights. Wagoner said that hearing one song made him realize he wanted to work with her. The song, which she wrote years before fame, showed Wagoner her soul.
Dolly Parton played Porter Wagoner a song she wrote while fishing
Wagoner initially did not want to work with Parton. When he heard the song “Everything’s Beautiful (In Its Own Way),” though, he knew she was a talented artist.
“It could be a pop record, you know, but still it’s country lyrics . . . it’s a clean idea,” he said, per the book Smart Blonde by Stephen Miller. “It’s somethin’ people need, you know, people seem to forget about God and everything with all the stuff goin’ on in the world, and they don’t really think to look around to, you know, the things that really mean anything.”
He said the song showed him Parton’s soul.
“This song told me so much about her,” he said, per the book Dolly by Alanna Nash. “I knew that if a person could sit down and write a song like that, they’d have to have a real soul inside them.”
Porter Wagoner shared the deciding factor that made him work with Dolly Parton
While the song impressed Parton, it was not the sole reason he decided he wanted to work with her. He realized his audiences would like her.
“There was a lot that sold me on Dolly but I think the deciding factor was Dolly’s personality — her warmth, her sincerity, her bein’ a real person,” he said. “She’s the kind of girl you can take anywhere under any conditions to meet anyone, and they’d like her … She has the type of personality I could sell to people on television and in person.”
They had a close working relationship until 1974.
She later released the song with Willie Nelson
Years after she used the song to win over Wagoner, Parton released a duet version with Willie Nelson.
“Ray Stevens produced the record for Monument …” she wrote in her book Dolly Parton, Songteller: My Life in Lyrics. “Anyhow, I never got a big record out of it until Willie and I got to do it on our Winning Hand album.”
Parton and Nelson have been friends since the early days of their careers when they both worked as songwriters for Combine. She said she always jumped at the chance to work with him.
“So anytime I get to do anything with Willie, I’ll do it,” she said. “And anything I’ve ever asked him to do for me, he did. Fred Foster nurtured both of us and helped us both in our early days. We would have done anything for him, and that’s how The Winning Hand album came out.”
