Porter Wagoner Wouldn’t Let Himself or Dolly Parton Perform With a Certain Type of Country Star
Porter Wagoner and Dolly Parton spent years working together on music and performances. While she got off to a rocky start on his show, they established themselves as a strong duo. They had a gleaming public image that Wagoner worked hard to protect. He wouldn’t even let them play shows with certain artists.
Porter Wagoner didn’t want himself or Dolly Parton performing with certain people
While some country singers sang about drinking and cheating, Wagoner liked to keep a cleaner image. He refused to perform in shows with too many other artists, particularly those who performed drunk. At the time, this meant Parton couldn’t either.
“I can’t see why anyone would take a business that has been good to them and abuse it … by doing bad shows, going out on the road and getting drunk,” he said, per the book Smart Blonde by Stephen Miller. “Fans spend their hard-earned dollars to see them and they see nothing but a drunk onstage.”
He disliked and struggled to understand artists who “got themselves involved in problems in clubs or alleys.”
He often set the rules for their working relationship
Wagoner often set rules like this in his working relationship with Parton. He wanted control over their creative decisions.
“She had more freedom on All I Can Do than she’d ever had, or at least that’s what she told me,” her guitarist, Tom Rutledge, said in the book Dolly by Alanna Nash. “But she had ideas of how she wanted the material recorded, ‘cause she’d written it. And Porter had his ideas, because he was the producer. And I guess most of the time he would win out, mostly through intimidation, because of the type of personality he is.”
She felt stifled by his overbearing nature and was only able to gain complete control of her career when she cut ties with him.
“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. “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.”
Dolly Parton recalled the difficult early days of performing with Porter Wagoner
Parton settled into performing with Wagoner, and they worked well together. In the earliest days of their working relationship, though, people disliked her. She replaced another woman on his show, and they often booed Parton and demanded the other singer.
“I couldn’t begin to imagine how hard it was really going to be,” she said, per the book Dolly on Dolly. “It just froze me because I was stepping into big, big shoes. Norma had been with the show for seven years, and I knew everybody would just naturally resent me for trying to, well, replace her. Even the band, until they got to know me, ’cause she had just left, and I had to step in right away . . . Oh, I can never make it plain to anyone what torture it was the first few times on that show, knowin’ that everybody was wanting to see and hear someone else. It was like murder!”
Wagoner thought that her persistence in this situation showed her strength of spirit.
