Dolly Parton spent several years as a singer on The Porter Wagoner Show before her solo career took off. While Parton has said she appreciates all Wagoner did for her, she admitted their relationship was a near-constant challenge. She shared why she started to view him as a “disaster” for her, even though she would always love him.

Dolly Parton said working with Porter Wagoner became a problem

Parton joined Wagoner’s show in 1967. Their tours and duets gained them great success, but things were uneasy behind the scenes. While Parton respected Wagoner, she didn’t think they were necessarily good for each other as partners.

“Porter has been one of the greatest and most popular country artists of all times,” she told Playboy in 1978, per the book Dolly on Dolly. “I can never take the credit away from Porter for givin’ me a big break. I learned a lot from him. He inspired me and I inspired him. We were good for each other in many ways and just a disaster for each other in a lot of ways. I’ll always love him in my own way.”

She said she fought with him almost constantly.

“We just got to where we argued and quarreled about personal things,” she explained. “Things we had no business quarreling and arguing about. It was beginning to tarnish a really good relationship. We didn’t get along very well, but no more his fault than mine. We were just a lot alike. Both ambitious. I wanted to do things my way and he wanted to do things his way.”

She left his show in 1974 to pursue her solo career. Wagoner did not take this well.

Dolly Parton once said she didn’t consider Porter Wagoner her enemy

After Parton and Wagoner ended their partnership, he spoke irritably about her in public. She once acknowledged his bitterness.

“I’m sure he is bitter at this particular point,” she said. “He is so strongheaded and bullheaded, he won’t accept things sometimes the way they are. I won’t either, sometimes.”

Still, she said she didn’t hold this against him.

“Someday, I hope we can just be friends,” she said. “We are not enemies. We just don’t ever see each other.”

He sued her for millions of dollars

The gulf between them widened when Wagoner sued Parton for breach of contract in 1979. He demanded $3 million. 

“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 [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.”

She said it took everything she had to pay him. 

“I paid the debt. It took everything I had, everything Carl had, everything I could make for years to come, but I paid it,” she wrote, adding, “I made up my mind that if he could live with it, I could live without it. I have done all right without it. I suppose Porter has done all right with it. I am neither his conscience nor his accountant.”

They reconciled before his death in 2007. She wrote the song “I Will Always Love You” for him.