Dolly Parton I Know You 39;re Married But I Love You Still Lyrics

[Inell Krolick]

In the late 1960s, Porter Wagoner made Dolly2 a recurring guest on The Porter Wagoner Show, and she basically lit the joint on fire with her smile and her songwriting chops. Dolly was already on her way to the stars, but Porter gave her career an early boost. For awhile, it was a fine partnership, but Dolly craved and deserved solo recognition, and by 1973, matters had come to a boil inside Dolly's head. She was so dang popular that she was even being asked to ceremonially open dams, like that one there east of Nashville pictured above, but she was still under Porter's wing. But she knew a change was soon to come.

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A few years back, I was at Dulles Airport trying to get a few minutes\u2019 peace before dealing with two wriggling children on a flight. I volunteered to go purchase snacks, but used the opportunity \u2014 as every momentarily off-duty parent does \u2014 to steal a few minutes for myself looking at the rows of airport books. There, I picked up a book entitled \u201CGetting Things Done,\u201D written by a productivity guru named David Allen1. I didn\u2019t know it, but I wasn\u2019t buying a book \u2026 I was buying a manifesto.

And so began my descent into The Cult of Productivity, a strange and bizarre world dedicated to streamlining the act of working without focusing on the product. The best way to describe it would be like reading a cookbook that spends 300 pages telling you how to organize your kitchen \u2026 and doesn\u2019t give you a single recipe. The Cult of Productivity does have its uses \u2014 I could bore the skin off your bones telling you how it\u2019s improved my workflow \u2014 but it\u2019s also seductive, so much so that you can spend so much time setting up your workspace that you don\u2019t actually, you know, work.

Productivity freaks love case studies \u2014 you may remember that certain Instagram rise-and-grind motivational doofuses spent the first days after March 2020 bloviating that \u201CShakespeare wrote \u2018King Lear\u2019 during a pandemic, what are you gonna do with this gift of time???\u201D Yeah, well, Shakespeare didn\u2019t have Netflix, jackass.

But nothing quite compares to the reverence with which productivity goons approach a certain Dolly Parton anecdote, citing it as proof that if you live the grindstyle, bro, you too can approach genius. You know what I\u2019m talking about by the headline, but let\u2019s lay it out here for the purposes of narrative seamlessness:

I don\u2019t need to introduce Dolly Parton here, do I? National treasure, voice of an angel, sweeter than strawberry pie and always three steps ahead of all of us. The fourth of 12 children, raised in a Tennessee cabin, she carved out a wide path in country music using charm, wit, skill, wigs and her other assets.

One afternoon right around this time, Dolly visited her local bank with her husband \u2014 the rarely-seen Carl Dean \u2014 and observed him getting a little friendly with the bank teller, a beautiful redhead by the name of Jolene. Carl handled Dolly\u2019s business affairs while she was out on the road, you see, and often had occasion to visit the bank. Now, Dolly and Carl are still married to this day, but the last thing you want to do is give a songwriter more material.

\u201CPeople don\u2019t care if your momma\u2019s got a kettle or a skillet. Who cares?\u201D Porter said. \u201CYou need something that people will listen to. You need to write a song about the most identifiable subject, one about love.\u201D

Now that\u2019s a hell of a story, right? Of course, you\u2019ll note that Porter puts himself right at the center of it, as both motivator and scarily prescient judge of its success. Dolly has recounted it somewhat differently \u2014 not directly, of course, that would be impolite \u2014 implying that it was about wanting to make a necessary break from Porter, no matter how much she still cared for him and appreciated what he\u2019d done for her.

She\u2019s right. \u201CI Will Always Love You\u201D is as pure as music gets, emotion that can melt the coldest heart. Fans have told Dolly they\u2019ve played it at the bedsides of dying relatives in hospitals, for their children\u2019s graduations, for moments when saying \u201CI love you\u201D isn\u2019t enough.

How strong is that song? Elvis himself sang it to Priscilla when they walked out of the courthouse after their divorce. The King wanted to record a version of the song himself, but the ever-grimy Col. Tom Parker demanded half the publishing rights. Dolly, heartbroken but resolute, refused \u2026 and it turned out to be one of the savviest business decisions in music industry history, because when Whitney Houston recorded her astoundingly popular version in the 1990s, all that money flowed Dolly\u2019s way.

From a songwriting perspective, so much about \u201CJolene\u201D makes it a fascinating listen. The main, creeping riff is played on a nylon-stringed classical guitar, not the typical twangy steel-stringed country of the day. The song begins with the immortal, pleading chorus, which is an entirely separate melody from the main riff. It\u2019s timeless in both subject and execution.

Through the years, many other singers have tried their hand at \u201CJolene,\u201D and it\u2019s so good that it can lift the profile of virtually any vocalist. Miley Cyrus, who\u2019s now lived enough life to catch up to the richness of her voice, delivers a resonant version. The White Stripes, as always, slouch in the right direction of the song but don\u2019t stick the landing. If you ever wanted to hear what a Dolly Parton bass drop sounds like, someone named Destructo has your remixed version of \u201CJolene\u201D right here. There\u2019s even a screamo metal version that honestly sounds fairly badass, a testament to the underlying strength of the song.

The whole \u201Cboth on the same day\u201D anecdote dates back to 2017, when she told a radio show that she\u2019d found an old cassette of some initial songwriting efforts, and both songs were on that cassette, ergo, they must have been done right around the same time. (We need to hear that cassette.)

Here\u2019s the thing: Dolly has written literally thousands of songs. Friends tell tales of her writing entire songs on napkins at dinner. She\u2019s apparently got thousands of unrecorded or unreleased songs tucked away in Tennessee vaults. And the early \u201870s were a particularly prolific period for her. So it\u2019s entirely possible \u2014 likely, even \u2014 that she cranked out at least pieces of both songs on the same day.

\u201CIf I didn\u2019t write it on the same day, it was during that same week or that period of time when I had that particular set in my little player,\u201D she told GQ in 2020. \u201CIt was very possible that it happened.\u201D

So maybe the songs didn\u2019t spring, clearly formed, from Dolly\u2019s forehead one after another on one particularly significant (and profitable) day. But that\u2019s not really the point. The main takeaway from the Dolly story is this: she created, so much and so often, that brilliance found its way out. She didn\u2019t worry about how to write songs, or how to prepare to write songs, or how to organize her life so she could write songs \u2026 she just wrote the damn songs.

Let\u2019s wrap this with one more Dolly song. By the 1990s, Dolly was in what appeared to be the downslope of her career but turned out to be just a valley. Like Johnny Cash, Loretta Lynn and other artists of a certain vintage have done, she stopped trying to make music for the times and instead went back to her roots. The result was a bluegrass album, \u201CThe Grass Is Blue,\u201D whose title song is just charming as hell. Here it is, part of the ongoing, ever-growing Flashlight & A Biscuit playlist:

This is issue #91 of Flashlight & A Biscuit. Check out all the past issues right here. Feel free to email me with your thoughts, tips and advice. If you\u2019re new around here, jump right to our most-read stories, or check out some of our recent hits:

Dolly Rebecca Parton (born January 19, 1946) is an American singer-songwriter, actress, and philanthropist, known primarily for her decades-long career in country music. After achieving success as a songwriter for others, Parton made her album debut in 1967 with Hello, I'm Dolly, which led to success during the remainder of the 1960s (both as a solo artist and with a series of duet albums with Porter Wagoner), before her sales and chart peak arrived during the 1970s and continued into the 1980s. Some of Parton's albums in the 1990s did not sell as well, but she achieved commercial success again in the new millennium and has released albums on various independent labels since 2000, including her own label, Dolly Records.

With a career spanning over fifty years, Parton has been described as a "country legend" and has sold more than 100 million records worldwide, making her one of the best-selling music artists of all time.[2][3] Parton's music includes Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA)-certified gold, platinum and multi-platinum awards. She has had 25 singles reach No. 1 on the Billboard country music charts, a record for a female artist (tied with Reba McEntire). She has 44 career Top 10 country albums, a record for any artist, and she has 110 career-charted singles over the past 40 years. She has composed over 3,000 songs, including "I Will Always Love You" (a two-time U.S. country chart-topper, and an international hit for Whitney Houston), "Jolene", "Coat of Many Colors", and "9 to 5". As an actress, she has starred in the films 9 to 5 in 1980 and The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas in 1982 (for each of which she earned Best Actress Golden Globe nominations) as well as Rhinestone in 1984, Steel Magnolias in 1989, Straight Talk in 1992, and Joyful Noise in 2012.

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