(Credits: Far Out / Dolly Parton)
Thu 26 March 2026 0:00, UK
No one is able to have a career that spans as long as Dolly Parton has without having a few rough patches here and there.
Although Parton has been able to weather virtually anything that comes her way and still manages to be one of the most wholesome figures in music history, there are bound to be a few times when she even has to look back and wonder what the hell she was thinking about some of her songs. But while you can blame a lot of that on early-career naivete, there are a lot more moments where Parton felt that some of her friends got her into the worst situations she could have asked for.
Then again, Parton has always been one to stand her ground every single time she works on one of her records. For as wholesome and nice as she is, she isn’t a pushover by any stretch, and she was going to make a name for himself after spending years of being at Porter Wagoner’s side. There were no hard feelings, but she needed to be her own independent artist rather than spend the rest of her life pleasing someone else.
And even when she had the opportunities most songwriters would kill for, she wasn’t a sucker by any means. Elvis Presley may have been interested in cutting ‘I Will Always Love You’, but Parton wasn’t going to watch as one of her best songs was sung by ‘The King’ with part of his copyright slapped on it. She cared too much about her artistry, and by the time that she reached her later years, working with the Trio was bound to be a match made in heaven once they started cutting records.
Compared to every other supergroup in rock history, getting Parton together with Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris was like the female version of the Traveling Wilburys. Each one of them blended perfectly with each other on that first record, and while it might not have been the coolest genre pivot in the world, hearing them go back to the sounds of old country was never going to go out of style, no matter what decade they were in.
But for as much as it was putting that first record together, getting the second one off the ground was a lot more difficult. While it did see the light of day in the late 1990s, Parton remembered the group getting too tied up in business decisions to the point where Ronstadt and Harris kept working together while Parton went out on tour. It might have been water under the bridge after a while, but leaving that second album behind for years was a real missed opportunity when Parton talked about it.
She may have been the one wanting to go on tour by herself, but she remembered that it broke her heart seeing some of those songs go to waste, saying, “They pitched a fit and dumped the greatest project ever. It was a sin and a shame- and a stupid decision- to give that album an abortion. It got into a power play. I was made to feel hurt, insulted, burdened with guilt. I would have lived up to my word, but my word wasn’t good enough for them.”
While the end result meant taking Parton to court, it’s not like the record didn’t speak for itself once it came out. Even after all that bad blood, their vocals were still absolutely stunning, and compared to the original versions of these songs, their version of Neil Young’s ‘After the Gold Rush’ is still one of the most beautiful arrangements that that song has ever gone through.
Parton would have preferred not to have gone through the headache of having to get there, but now that it’s out in the world, those little spats feel more like a blip on the radar. It might not have been fun fighting over the album coming out, but since we can all enjoy it today, the only tragedy is that we never got to hear more beyond this point.
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