Dolly Parton joined Porter Wagoner’s show in 1967, bringing her the widespread attention her career needed. She was grateful for the opportunity, but her partnership with Wagoner began to weigh on her. Parton had ideas for her career that Wagoner admittedly would not allow her to implement. He said he had little interest in her creative input when they were working together.

Porter Wagoner didn’t want Dolly Parton’s creative input

Parton and Wagoner were not equals in their partnership. Wagoner said he was fully in charge of their creative decisions. 

“We were gonna do things my way,” he said, per the book Dolly: The Biography by Alanna Nash. “Because that’s the kind of person I am. Dolly Parton’s career up until she left me was done my way. That’s the only way it could be successful operating with me, because if we had done it her way it would not have worked. Had we done the songs she would like to have done, the way she would like to have done them, it would not have worked.”

It was his show, he said, and he didn’t hire Parton to give him any new ideas.

“I signed the checks at that time, so we did things my way, and that was the way I was born and reared to do — that if you paid a man to work for you, he worked for you; he didn’t tell you what to do,” he said. “If he did, that would be called an adviser. So I wasn’t looking for an adviser when I hired Dolly. Whenever she talked about her career and the directions we were going, she didn’t have all these ideas at that time.”

He said he got her career off the ground

After Parton and Wagoner went their separate ways, her career continued to grow. He believed she should have given him more credit for her success.

“It’s awful easy, believe me, and I say this with no resentment from Dolly’s career, but it is awful easy when you have something that’s successful for you to convince yourself, ‘I’m doing this, I’m the only one can do it, there ain’t nobody involved in this but me,’” he said. “It’s easy to convince yourself of that.”

While he didn’t deny she was a good writer, he didn’t think that was all it took to be successful. Wagoner believed she needed him to get her ideas off the ground.

“What I did in her career, the production of her records, was develop ideas that came out of my own mind, with extra insertions from her mind, of different things and different other people,” he said. “To me that’s what it’s about; that’s the only way you can make it. Because you can be the greatest writer in all the world, and unless someone will be interested in what you have and work with you on it to help get it exposed to the public, all you can do is run around saying, ‘I’m the greatest writer in the world.’ So it takes more than ideas.”

Dolly Parton’s guitarist said she was ‘miserable’ while working with Porter Wagoner

Those who knew Parton said the working dynamic with Wagoner was hard on her. She couldn’t express herself in the way she wanted.

“Dolly’s music is a very, very personal thing to her,” her guitarist Tom Rutledge said. “It almost kills her to have to record something not the way she wants to record it. And I know that was a big part of her leaving — not to be able to express her music the way she wanted to express it.”

Rutledge said Parton felt struck and frustrated in the partnership.

“And I’m sure on stage, too, it was the same way. The way the show was presented was the way Porter said it would be presented,” he said. “So her whole career was influenced by Porter, and if it wasn’t the way she wanted to do it, she was miserable.”