Dolly Parton's Influence Leads to Porter Wagoner Album Decades After Their Rift

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Dolly Parton wears a red dress and stands with Porter Wagoner. She holds a microphone.

Music

Dolly Parton and Porter Wagoner ended their relationship on bad terms. Years later, though, he named an album after something she said to him.

Published on July 12, 2025

Dolly Parton and Porter Wagoner had a years of fruitful collaboration, followed by one of the most notorious falling outs in country music. Wagoner, frustrated that Parton didn’t want his help on her solo career, sued her for $3 million. While they settled out of court, the situation did nothing good for their already-strained relationship. As the years passed, though, they eventually got on better terms. Wagoner even named an album after something Parton told him.

Dolly Parton inspired the title of a Porter Wagoner album

In 2000, while working on his first album in decades, Wagoner sought out Parton’s advice. Their once-icy dynamic had thawed by this point — it had been 21 years since he sued her — and Wagoner knew he could trust Parton to be honest with him.

“We know each other probably as well as two people can know each other,” he said, per the book Smart Blonde by Stephen Miller. “I thought she’d give me an honest answer.”

She sent him a long letter in response and praised the album as “by far the best thing you’ve ever done.” Wagoner used her words as inspiration for the title, calling the album The Best I’ve Ever Been.

Their relationship was on solid enough ground that, two years after Wagoner released The Best I’ve Ever Been, Parton agreed to sing at a show celebrating Wagoner’s induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame. She sang “I Will Always Love You,” a song she wrote about him.

“Turned out that Dolly agreed to do one,” said the show’s host, Jack Clement. “They’d been on kind of the outs for a while … but they got back together … they wound up singing my song ‘Someone I Used To Know.’ It had to be songs that related to Porter in some fashion, so she sang ‘I Will Always Love You’ which is really probably her swansong, and she sang the living s*** out of it.”

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