Dolly Parton’s songwriting was one of the things that made Porter Wagoner start paying attention to her. She recalls memories of her own childhood and invents stories and characters with whom the listener can connect. Parton sometimes touched on difficult subjects in her writing, and Wagoner once asked her to take a verse out of a song. He said it wouldn’t sell otherwise.

Porter Wagoner asked Dolly Parton to change the lyrics to one song

Parton released the song “Down From Dover” in 1970. The song is about a pregnant teenager whose family and lover turn their back on her. 

“Back when I wrote it, if you got pregnant out of wedlock, you were either going to have to get rid of the baby, have it adopted, or you just had to leave home altogether,” Parton wrote in her book Dolly Parton, Songteller. 

The song, as a result, was very taboo for the time. Wagoner told her that no one would ever play it if she didn’t remove one verse. In it, Parton sings about having to leave home to work for an old woman on a farm. Even with the edit, though, radio stations did not want to play the song.

“It couldn’t be released as a single because of its subject,” Parton wrote. “Disc jockeys weren’t interested in it; it was too controversial. Even to this day, people don’t talk about this, and they especially didn’t back then.”

Parton re-released the song in 2001, and she included the cut verse.

Dolly Parton started writing the song on Porter Wagoner’s tour bus

Parton said she first began working on the song while touring with Wagoner. 

“I remember that I started writing it on Porter Wagoner’s tour bus,” she wrote. “We rode past Dover, Tennessee, and my mind started blowing. It was a beautiful day, and the wind was blowing. There was this field of clover waving in the wind. So there we were, Dover-clover, and that just started me off: ‘The sun behind a cloud just cast a crawling shadow o’er the fields of clover. And time is running out for me. I wish that he would hurry back from Dover.’”

She said that people in Dover, England, and Dover, Delaware, often think the song is about their cities. 

She said the song makes her realize how ‘morbid’ she is

While Parton has a sunny disposition, the song is devastating.

“In the song, the parents turned against the girl,” she wrote. “They sent her out, so she found a place out on a farm with an old lady, and the baby died. Lord, I just can’t get depressing enough, can I?”

She said the song makes people realize her ability to dive into morbid subject matters. 

“Only when I start talking about it or thinking about it do I realize how morbid I really am,” she wrote. “People always say, ‘You just seem so happy.’ I say, ‘Yeah, but I can certainly write you a morbid song!’”