After spending time on the road together, Merle Haggard fell head over heels in love with Dolly Parton. She was married at the time and repeatedly told him she didn’t return his feelings. Still, he pined after her to a point where he couldn’t think of anything else. When Parton heard about this years later, she said she wished she’d flirted more with him.

Merle Haggard admitted he was deeply in love with Dolly Parton 

While touring, Haggard and Parton spent a great deal of time together between shows. He said he got to know a more complex and vibrant version of her than the public sees, and he fell hard.

“I didn’t just fall in love with the image of Dolly Parton,” he wrote in the book Sing Me Back Home: My Story. “Hell, I fell in love with that exceptional human being who lives underneath all that bunch of fluffy hair, fluttery eyelashes, and super boobs. I was like a schoolboy. I would have carved ‘Merle loves Dolly’ on every damn tree in the country if she’d asked me to.”

He understood that many people felt the same way, but he hoped things would be different for him.

“It was easy to understand why I was attracted to her,” he wrote in Sing Me Back Home: My Story. “God, every man in the country was hot for her — they still are. I thought I was different. I was fool enough to believe that she loved me back. Even now, my pride won’t let me believe that she didn’t — just a little bit.”

By this time, Parton had already married her husband, Carl Dean.

Dolly Parton shared how she would have acted if she had known Merle Haggard loved her

Years after writing his first book, Haggard wrote a second, My House of Memories. In it, he addressed what he wrote about Parton, but this time added her perspective. She told Haggard’s co-writer, Tom Carter, that while she’d loved Haggard, it was a platonic love. She joked that if she’d known the extent of his affection for her, she would have flirted back, at least a little.

“I didn’t realize [the crush] was to that extent, or I would’ve probably done something about it,” she said, adding, “I’d at least’ve flirted a little more or something. I’d at least’ve made it worth his while.”

Despite this, Parton knew at the time that Haggard wrote “Always Wanting You” about her. He called her in the middle of the night, drunk, to tell her as much.

She didn’t like people acting too flirtatious with her

While Parton has said she loves to flirt, she reportedly disliked it when people were overly presumptuous with her.

“I’ve never seen a man get physical with her, but I’ve seen men get very suggestive after one too many drinks,” her guitarist, Tom Rutledge, said in the book Dolly by Alanna Nash. “I know it really, really tees her off, but you’d never know it until afterwards, when she says, ‘That son of a b****.’”

Still, Rutledge said Parton always prevented the interactions from crossing any lines.

“She’ll put him down to where he’ll lose his passion pretty quick,” he said. “She’s good at making her feelings known to someone.”