🚨 JUST IN: The One Song Dolly Parton Says Gave Her “The Best Break of My Life” — and Why It Still Matters Today ⚡ML
Most of Dolly Parton’s greatest songs were inspired by major turning points in her life.
And if they weren’t about career-altering pivotal moments, they were about the people and situations that formed the fabric of her existence, like her family, or growing up in a household where the energy was lively but the resources were limited.
Geese covering ‘Roadrunner’ by The Modern Lovers live in Boston
One of the most notable examples of this is Parton’s intimate ode to finding love and belonging without the material means, ‘Coat of Many Colors’. The song was an immense labour of love for Parton, exploring the connection between the coat itself and the broader themes of familial values and resilience through troubled times. It’s no surprise, therefore, why it remains her favourite out of the thousands of songs that she’s written.
What makes these songs resonate with Parton long after she’s written them isn’t just how personal they feel, but how she can still sing them with the same level of intensity and reverence as she did back then, knowing that they still mean as much, if not more. As she once told Mojo of ‘Coat of Many Colors’, “[It speaks well of] my spiritual values too. I can always sing that sincerely from my heart.”
Another major song came when Parton parted from her mentor and iconic country singer, Porter Wagoner. Parton joined Wagoner’s show, The Porter Wagoner Show, at just 21 years old in 1967, and, although there would eventually be frictions that both of them struggled to look past, moving on from Wagoner was one of the hardest things that Parton ever had to do.
So hard, in fact, that she wrote one of her best songs about it – ‘I Will Always Love You’. One of the biggest stories around this song is usually the one where Parton rejected an offer from Elvis Presley’s team to let him cover it. But, while that’s a pretty big decision to make and definitely worthy of note in some discussions, her reasons were always about what the song meant to her, and less about denying a potential hit by the King himself.
More than that, however, it summarised everything anybody would ever need to know about Parton’s relationship wth Wagoner, and how she always felt appreciative of everything that they did together, even if sometimes they didn’t see eye to eye. It says a lot, too, that, of all of Parton’s achievements, being allowed to sing wth Wagoner on her first-ever single, ‘The Last Thing on My Mind’, is the one she feels the most grateful for.
“It was a really humbling experience, and it was a wonderful night with Porter, knowing that Porter was such a big part of country music,” Parton told The Boot while celebrating her 50th anniversary as a member of the Grand Ole Opry a few years back. “So that was the best break of my life, ever,” she went on. “And Porter and I were together all the time. We were very prosperous together, very productive, and we sang great together. So I thank him every day.”
When Parton pursued her own path, she knew it would be a challenge. After all, Wagoner had a heavy hand in shaping the early stages of Parton’s career, pushing her to a new level of greatness and teaching her things that she still thinks about to this day. But most of her best career moments have been marked by such immense transformation, usually when she makes the jump from one fruitful situation to another, no matter how much it stings her heart to move on.
As she puts it in the song: “Bittersweet memories / That’s all I’m taking with me / Goodbye, please don’t cry / We both know that I’m not what you need / But I will always love you…”
