Dolly Parton and Porter Wagoner: The Seven-Year Partnership That Made Her a Star — and the Song That Ended It

Sometime in 1973, Dolly Parton sat by the fireplace at her home in Antioch, Tennessee, and tried to figure out how to tell Porter Wagoner she was leaving. She had tried talking to him. It hadn’t worked. As she later told CMT, he just couldn’t hear her out. So she did the one thing she knew would get through. She wrote him a song.

The next day she walked into his office and sang it to him. The song was “I Will Always Love You.” When she finished, Porter told her she could go, on one condition: he wanted to produce the record.

That scene sits at the center of one of the most important and most complicated partnerships in the history of country music. For seven years, Porter Wagoner and Dolly Parton were a team on television, on the road, and in the studio. He gave her a national stage when she was a twenty-one-year-old with one modest hit. She gave him the most successful duet partnership of his life. Then it came apart, first with a song and later with a lawsuit, and it took the better part of two decades to heal.

Both of them are gone now. Porter died in 2007, with Dolly at his side. Dolly died on August 25, 2026, at the age of 80. What’s left is the music they made, the television they made it on, and a story that deserves to be told straight, without turning either of them into a villain or a saint.

Porter Wagoner Before Dolly: The Thin Man From West Plains

Porter Wayne Wagoner was born on August 12, 1927, in the Ozark country of Howell County, Missouri, and grew up around West Plains. He was a farm boy who learned guitar from the radio. By 1950 he was singing on local station KWPM, broadcasting from the butcher shop where he cut meat for a living. In 1951, KWTO in Springfield hired him, and in 1952 he signed with RCA Victor.

Success did not come fast. His early records didn’t sell, and for a while he and his trio played schoolhouses for whatever came in at the door. The trio included Don Warden on steel guitar, a man who would stay at Porter’s side for decades and later play a role in Dolly’s story too. Things turned in 1953, when Carl Smith took Porter’s song “Trademark” to No. 2. Porter’s own “Company’s Comin'” reached the Top 10, and in 1955 “A Satisfied Mind” went to No. 1.

He became a regular on ABC’s Ozark Jubilee, moved to Nashville in 1956, and joined the Grand Ole Opry in 1957. Then, in 1960, the Chattanooga Medicine Company asked him to front a syndicated television show. It was a half-hour program built around Porter, his band, a comedian named Speck Rhodes, and a young singer from Oklahoma named Norma Jean. It would run for more than two decades and reach nearly a hundred markets.

By the time Dolly came along, Porter was a star in his own right, with a string of hits that included “Misery Loves Company,” “Green, Green Grass of Home,” and “The Cold Hard Facts of Life.” He had won Grammys for gospel records with the Blackwood Brothers. He wore rhinestone suits from Nudie’s of Hollywood that caught the studio lights even on black-and-white television. He was not a man who needed anybody to make him famous.

Dolly Before Porter: A Mountain Girl With One Hit

Dolly Rebecca Parton came to Nashville in 1964, right out of high school in Sevier County, Tennessee. She was the fourth of twelve children from a poor mountain family, and she had been singing on Knoxville radio and television since she was a child. On her first day in Nashville she met Carl Dean outside a laundromat. They married in 1966.

She was not quite the unknown she is sometimes made out to be. According to AllMusic’s biography, she was appearing on Knoxville television by the age of twelve, and at thirteen she was cutting a record for a small label and making her first appearance on the Grand Ole Opry stage. The talent was obvious early. What she lacked was a way to reach the rest of the country.

She spent those first years writing songs with her uncle Bill Owens and trying to get somebody to record them. She signed with Monument Records, and in 1967 she got her first real chart record with “Dumb Blonde,” a Curly Putman song. “Something Fishy,” one she wrote herself, followed it onto the chart. Her first album, Hello, I’m Dolly, came out that year.

That was the whole résumé. A couple of mid-chart singles, an album, and a reputation among Nashville songwriters as a girl who could write. According to AllMusic’s biography, “Dumb Blonde” was the record that caught Porter’s ear.

1967: The Girl Who Replaced Norma Jean

Norma Jean had been Porter’s singing partner on television since the early years of the show. By 1967 she was leaving. Billboard reported the split in its September 23, 1967, issue, describing them as a team of seven years. Porter needed a new “girl singer,” as the job was called in those days, and he took the search seriously. According to the Tennessee Encyclopedia, he auditioned a number of singers, including Connie Smith, Dottie West, and Tammy Wynette, before offering the job to Dolly.

It was not an easy spot to step into. Norma Jean was beloved by the show’s audience, and Dolly told the story for years of crowds on the road calling out for Norma Jean while she stood on stage trying to win them over. She won them over. It took a while, but between the voice, the looks, and her quick wit, she became the reason people tuned in.

The money was good. In the 2003 documentary Dolly Parton: Platinum Blonde, she said she started with Porter at $60,000 a year, which she described as more money than she had ever seen or heard of. For a girl who grew up in a one-room cabin, it was a fortune.

Porter also helped bring her to his own label. She signed with RCA Victor in 1967, as both a solo artist and his duet partner. That RCA deal is one of the most consequential things Porter ever did for her. It put her in the same studios, with the same producers and session players, as the biggest stars in Nashville.

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Also on Classic Country TV: Everything about the show that launched Dolly, from the patent-medicine sponsor to the rhinestone suits: The Porter Wagoner Show: Country TV’s Defining Program

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The Girl-Singer Chair on Porter’s Show

It helps to understand that Dolly was stepping into a role Porter had built on purpose. According to the Tennessee Encyclopedia, part of his formula from the beginning was to always feature a female singer. He believed the show itself was the star, a team effort among the band, the comedian, the guests, and the singers, rather than a showcase for any one performer.

That chair had already launched careers. Norma Jean held it through most of the 1960s and became a hitmaker on RCA in her own right. Jeannie Seely filled in for a stretch in the mid-1960s and left after scoring a hit with “Don’t Touch Me.” After Dolly left in 1974, Barbara Lea took the spot until 1976, followed by Linda Carol Moore until the show ended.

Every one of those women benefited from a weekly national audience. None of them came close to what Dolly did with it. That was partly talent and partly timing, but it was also ambition. The other singers treated the chair as a great job. Dolly treated it as a launching pad, and she made no secret of it. That difference in ambition is the key to everything that happened between her and Porter.

The Duet Years: Fourteen Top Ten Hits

The first duet came quickly. Porter and Dolly recorded Tom Paxton’s folk song “The Last Thing on My Mind,” and it became a Top Ten country hit, the first of many. Their first duet album, Just Between You and Me, came out in 1968.

What followed was one of the most productive duet partnerships in country history. According to the Country Music Hall of Fame, the pair placed fourteen duets in the Top Ten, with one No. 1. The hits included “We’ll Get Ahead Someday” in 1968, “Just Someone I Used to Know” in 1969, “Daddy Was an Old Time Preacher Man” in 1970, “Better Move It on Home” in 1971, “The Right Combination” in 1972, and “If Teardrops Were Pennies” in 1973. Their only chart-topper, “Please Don’t Stop Loving Me,” came in 1974, the same year she left.

They made thirteen duet albums together, with titles like Always, Always, Porter Wayne and Dolly Rebecca, Two of a Kind, Together Always, and Love and Music. The awards followed the records. The Country Music Association named them Vocal Group of the Year in 1968 and Vocal Duo of the Year in 1970 and 1971. Music City News gave them its duet award three years running.

The sound of those records is worth describing, because it was unusual. Porter had a dry, conversational baritone with the Ozarks all over it. Dolly had a high, pure mountain soprano that could cut through anything. On paper the voices didn’t match. On record, the contrast was the whole point. He grounded her. She lifted him. Listeners could hear two very different people finding the same song, and that tension made the duets feel alive.

What Porter and Dolly Looked Like on Saturday Television

For most fans, the partnership lived on the television screen. Each half-hour episode of The Porter Wagoner Show followed a comfortable pattern. Porter opened with a song, usually backed by his band, the Wagonmasters, with Buck Trent on banjo, Mack Magaha on fiddle, George McCormick on rhythm guitar, and Don Warden on steel. Speck Rhodes, a fellow West Plains native, did a comedy bit with his bass fiddle. A guest star came on for a song or two. A gospel number nearly always came near the end. And during Dolly’s years, she and Porter nearly always sang a duet.

The feel of the show was loose and friendly. Porter joked with the band, sometimes right in the middle of songs, and traded banter with Dolly and with announcer Don Howser. Dolly was quick, and she could give as good as she got. Viewers watching at home saw two people who seemed to genuinely enjoy each other’s company, which is part of why the later split stung so many of them.

The show also put Dolly next to some remarkable guests. The Country Music Hall of Fame preserves a 1973 episode in which she sings “Poison Love” with Chet Atkins. Over the show’s run, guests ranged from established stars like Tex Ritter and Cowboy Copas to young writers like Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings. For a singer still learning her craft, that was an education you could not buy.

Those episodes are among the most important records of Dolly’s early career, because they show her growing up in public. In the 1967 shows she is a talented newcomer finding her footing. By the early 1970s she is clearly the most magnetic person on the set. You can watch the balance of the partnership shift in real time.

Porter the Producer, Manager, and Publisher

Porter’s role went far beyond singing harmony. According to the Country Music Hall of Fame, he served as de facto producer and arranger on their duet albums and supervised Dolly’s solo RCA records during the same years. Bob Ferguson is credited as producer on many of her albums from that era, but Porter was deeply involved in what she recorded and how.

The results speak for themselves. Under that arrangement, Dolly’s solo career took off. Her remake of Jimmie Rodgers’s “Mule Skinner Blues” became her first solo Top Ten hit in 1970. “Joshua” became her first solo No. 1 in 1971. That same year came “Coat of Many Colors,” the song she would call her favorite for the rest of her life. She wrote it on the back of one of Porter’s dry-cleaning receipts, and Porter framed the receipt when the song became a hit. In 1972 she even released an album made entirely of his songs, My Favorite Songwriter, Porter Wagoner.

Their business lives were tangled together, too. They co-owned a music publishing company called Owepar, a name built from Owens, Wagoner, and Parton. The Tennessee Encyclopedia notes that by the time she left, the two owned nearly equal shares of a production company and had a complicated royalty agreement covering her songs and income. Those ties would matter a great deal later.

They also took on projects outside the usual RCA pipeline. In 1973 they recorded “Here Comes the Freedom Train,” their only single not released on RCA, as a fundraiser for a bicentennial train that was going to tour the country with a museum car carrying historic national documents. It is a small footnote, but it shows how much weight the Porter and Dolly name carried by then.

There were creative disagreements along the way. Porter later told CMT that around 1973 he had a long talk with Dolly about her songwriting. In his view, she was writing too many songs about her mother, her father, and the old home place. He told her that listeners in places like Idaho and Canada didn’t care about her mama’s black kettle or her daddy’s work boots, but they did know about love, and she needed to write love songs. Dolly kept writing both kinds, and history has mostly sided with her. But the conversation tells you how much control Porter expected to have.

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Also on Classic Country TV: The song she wrote on Porter’s dry-cleaning receipt, and why she loved it more than any other: Dolly Parton Wrote “Coat of Many Colors” on Porter Wagoner’s Dry-Cleaning Receipt

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Why Dolly Knew She Had to Leave

By the early 1970s, the balance of the partnership had shifted. Dolly was no longer the new girl. She was the one people came to see. The Porter Wagoner Show was still Porter’s show, and the band was still his band, but the biggest star on the stage was increasingly the woman standing next to him.

Dolly was open in later years about what she wanted and why she couldn’t get it there. In Platinum Blonde, she said she wanted big-time management and a career in movies. She wanted to be known around the world, not just on Saturday afternoons in a hundred television markets. She put it bluntly: if she was going to be a star, why not be a big one?

Money was part of it, too. She said Porter rarely gave her raises, even as she became the draw, and that he was making a great deal of money because of her while her salary stayed about where it started. And she said Porter tried to convince her that RCA would drop her the minute she left his show. Rather than take his word for it, she flew to New York on her own, met with RCA executives, and told them her plans. According to her account, they were excited and got fully behind her.

None of this made Porter a villain. He had built something real, and he had every reason to want to keep it together. But the arrangement that had launched her had become the thing holding her back. Dolly knew it. Porter didn’t want to hear it.

The Night She Wrote “I Will Always Love You”

That brings us back to the fireplace in Antioch. Dolly described the night to CMT in detail. She remembered exactly where she was sitting and what time it was. She said she and Porter had had great success together and a lot of problems. In her words, they didn’t get along very well, but they loved each other, too. And he would not hear her out.

So she wrote the song in a couple of hours. And in what has to be one of the most remarkable single nights in songwriting history, she said she wrote “Jolene” during the same session. Two of the most famous songs of the twentieth century, written on the same evening, one of them as a goodbye.

“I Will Always Love You” is not a romantic love song, though it has often been heard as one. It is a song about parting on good terms. The singer is leaving, knows it will hurt, and wants the other person to know she is grateful and wishes him well. Author Curtis W. Ellison has written that the song imagines a breakup that ends with respect rather than turmoil, and that it is the woman who makes the decision. That was exactly Dolly’s situation.

The next day she went to Porter’s office and sang it to him. By every account, it worked. He told her she could go, and he told her it was the best song she had ever written. His one condition was that he would produce the record.

Dolly recorded “I Will Always Love You” at RCA Studio B in Nashville on June 12, 1973. When RCA released the single in March 1974, the song on the flip side was “Lonely Comin’ Down,” a Porter Wagoner composition Dolly had cut back in May 1972. It is hard to know whether anyone at RCA noticed the irony. The A-side was Dolly’s goodbye to Porter. The B-side was Porter’s song. It was the second single from her Jolene album, and in June 1974 it reached No. 1 on the country chart.

They didn’t get along very well, but they loved each other, too.

Dolly Parton, recalling her years with Porter Wagoner

Elvis, Colonel Parker, and the Publishing Lesson

The song’s story took another turn soon after. Elvis Presley wanted to record “I Will Always Love You.” Dolly was thrilled, until she learned that Colonel Tom Parker expected her to give up half the publishing rights, as was standard practice with Elvis recordings. She said no. It broke her heart, she said later, but she said no.

That decision tells you a great deal about the woman Porter was losing. She had watched plenty of country performers come off the mountain, make fast money, and lose it all. She told interviewers she never wanted to get “hick rich.” She understood the business side of the music business, and she understood that owning her songs was worth more than any single cover. Owepar, the company she had co-owned with Porter, had taught her exactly how valuable a copyright could be.

The payoff came twice. Dolly re-recorded the song for the 1982 film The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, and it went to No. 1 on the country chart again. Then Whitney Houston recorded it for the 1992 film The Bodyguard. Her version spent 14 weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and became one of the best-selling singles in history. Because Dolly had kept her publishing, she shared in all of it.

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Also on Classic Country TV: The full story of the goodbye song, from the fireplace in Antioch to Whitney Houston: The True Story Behind Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You”

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The Last Show and the Slow Separation

Dolly and Porter performed their last show together in June 1974, the same month “I Will Always Love You” hit No. 1. But the separation was gradual rather than sudden. Porter kept producing her solo albums for two more years, through 1976’s All I Can Do. The duets kept coming, too. “Please Don’t Stop Loving Me” became their only No. 1 duet later in 1974, and their album Say Forever You’ll Be Mine came out in August 1975. It was their last album of new material together.

On the television show, Barbara Lea took over as Porter’s featured female singer. Dolly, meanwhile, was building a solo career at a rapid clip. “Jolene” and “Love Is Like a Butterfly” both went to No. 1 in 1974. In 1976 she launched her own syndicated television show, Dolly!, a clear sign of what she had learned in seven years on Porter’s stage.

Then she made the break complete. She hired new management in Los Angeles, stopped working with Porter as a producer, and set out to cross over into pop. In 1977 “Here You Come Again” gave her a No. 1 country hit and a major pop hit at the same time. She followed it with the movie 9 to 5 in 1980. Everything she had told Porter she wanted, she went out and got.

The Lawsuit: $3 Million and “the First Million Dollars I Ever Made”

For Porter, watching all this from Nashville was painful. On March 21, 1979, he filed a $3 million breach-of-contract lawsuit against Dolly. Billboard reported it in its March 31, 1979, issue under the headline “Dolly Parton Hit With $3 Mil Suit.”

The suit was specific. According to the filing as reported at the time, Porter sought an accounting of her net income and record royalties, 15 percent of her net income from June 1974 through June 1979, and 15 percent of her record royalties going forward. He asked the court to declare that she owed him 15 percent of her record royalties for as long as she earned them. As an alternative, he asked for $2 million for future lost income.

Dolly’s account of it, in her 1994 memoir Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business, is short and pointed. She wrote that Porter claimed he had made her a star and was entitled to a percentage of her career for life. She believed she could probably have won in court. But to spare her husband and her family a long, bitter fight, she agreed to settle out of court for around one million dollars. Years later she summed it up with a line that stuck: it took her a while to pay it off, but he got the first million dollars she ever made.

Porter was not gracious in those years. He said some harsh things about her to reporters, questioning her loyalty and her character, while insisting he wasn’t bitter. It is fair to say both of them were hurt, and that Porter’s hurt came out louder.

The settlement produced one more record. In 1980, RCA released Porter & Dolly, an album of previously unreleased duets they had recorded between 1968 and 1976, with new instrumental overdubs added in late 1979. Rumors that it would be a reunion album turned out to be only partly true. They were reportedly not speaking, and the photo on the cover was a composite of two separate pictures edited together. Even so, the single “Making Plans” went to No. 2 in 1980. The music still worked, even when the people didn’t.

Porter After Dolly

Porter’s career did not end when Dolly left, and it deserves more credit than it usually gets. The television show kept going into 1981, first with Barbara Lea and later Linda Carol Moore as his featured singer. After the Chattanooga Medicine Company ended its sponsorship in 1973, he moved the production to the new Opryland television studios.

He also showed a restless curiosity that surprised people who only knew him as the man in the rhinestone suit. According to the Country Music Hall of Fame, he brought soul singer James Brown to the Grand Ole Opry and produced R&B sessions for Joe Simon. He appeared in Clint Eastwood’s 1982 film Honkytonk Man. In 1984 he hosted Porter Wagoner at Opryland on The Nashville Network, and in the mid-1980s he toured with an all-female group he named the Right Combination, after one of his biggest hits with Dolly.

That last detail says something. Years after the split, after the lawsuit, Porter still named his band after a duet he had sung with her. Whatever he said to reporters, the partnership was still the thing he was proudest of.

What the Partnership Meant for Country Music

It is easy to reduce this story to a rise, a fall, and a lawsuit. But the Porter and Dolly years mattered well beyond the two of them.

First, they showed what television could do for a country career. Before cable and before music videos, the only way most rural and small-town Americans could see country stars was on syndicated shows like Porter’s. Dolly became a household name not through radio alone, but by appearing in living rooms every week. The Tennessee Encyclopedia notes that the show served as a model for later country variety programs, including two of Dolly’s own. She took what she learned about television from Porter and built on it for the rest of her life.

Second, they made the male-female duet one of the defining forms of country music in that era. Porter and Dolly were not the only great duet act. George Jones and Tammy Wynette and Conway Twitty and Loretta Lynn were right there with them. But Porter and Dolly were first to the top of the CMA duo category and set a template the others worked from.

Third, and maybe most important, the partnership became a lesson in how Nashville treated its young women artists. Dolly was lucky to have a mentor who believed in her and who opened doors she could not have opened alone. She was also bound by a contract, a salary, and a set of expectations that were built for a supporting player, not a star. Her decision to leave, and to fight for her own publishing and her own career, set an example that a lot of women in country music followed. She showed that you could be grateful to the man who helped you and still refuse to let him own you.

The Reconciliation

Time did its work. By the late 1980s, Porter and Dolly had reconciled, and in the years that followed they appeared together a number of times. Porter, for his part, had settled into the role of elder statesman. After Roy Acuff died in 1992, Porter became something like the Opry’s unofficial spokesman. He co-hosted Opry Backstage on The Nashville Network for nearly a decade.

In 2002, Porter Wagoner was elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame. Dolly, who had been inducted in 1999, was the one who inducted him. Whatever had happened between them, she wanted to be the person who stood up and honored him.

His last year was one of the best of his life. In June 2007, Anti- Records released Wagonmaster, an album produced by Marty Stuart that drew the best reviews of Porter’s career. That July he opened for the White Stripes at a sold-out Madison Square Garden, playing old-fashioned country to a young rock crowd. In 2007 the Opry honored him for fifty years of membership.

Then, in October 2007, he was diagnosed with lung cancer. He died in Nashville on October 28, 2007, at the age of 80. According to CMT’s reporting at the time, his family and Dolly Parton were at his side. His funeral was held on November 1 at the Grand Ole Opry House, and he was buried at Woodlawn Memorial Park in Nashville. Afterward, Dolly performed a concert in his memory at Dollywood.

It is hard to imagine a more fitting ending for the two of them. The man who gave her a stage, the woman who outgrew it, the song that said goodbye, the lawsuit that hurt them both, and then, at the very end, Dolly sitting at his bedside. She meant every word of that song.

The Partnership in the Weeks After Dolly’s Death

When Dolly died on August 25, 2026, the obituaries all came back to Porter. The Associated Press, NPR, and others described her 1967 hiring as her big break. It was.

Two weeks before her death, on August 12, 2026, Porter would have turned 99, and outlets from Parade to American Songwriter marked the day by remembering how he helped launch her. His centennial falls on August 12, 2027.

His hometown is keeping the connection alive. West Plains, Missouri, has scheduled Dolly & Porter Days for October 2–3, 2026, a two-day festival in the downtown district honoring Porter and his lasting connection to Dolly, with live music, a Dolly and Porter costume contest, and a “Rags to Art” fiber art showcase inspired by “Coat of Many Colors.” The city already honors him with Porter Wagoner Boulevard and a Porter Wagoner Trail through the places that mattered to him.

And the music is all still there. In 2014, Bear Family Records released Just Between You and Me: The Complete Recordings, 1967–1976, a box set collecting every duet they cut, including the original masters of the songs on Porter & Dolly without the 1979 overdubs.

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Also on Classic Country TV: For the full account of Dolly’s life and the legacy she left behind: The Death of Dolly Parton: Inside the Life, Career, and Legacy of Country Music’s Queen

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Watch on Classic Country TV: Our short on the seven-year partnership that made Dolly a star.

Why It Still Matters

The Porter Wagoner and Dolly Parton story is sometimes told as a fable about a controlling man and a woman who escaped him. It is sometimes told the other way, as a story about an ungrateful star who forgot who made her. Neither version holds up against the record.

What the record actually shows is two gifted, stubborn people who needed each other for a while and then didn’t. Porter gave Dolly a national audience, a record deal, a band, and a platform she used brilliantly. Dolly gave Porter the best-selling and best-remembered work of his career. When she outgrew the arrangement, she told him so in the most generous way she could: with a song that thanked him. When he couldn’t let go, he took her to court. And when enough years had passed, they found their way back to each other.

That is a human story, not a cautionary tale, and it deserves to be remembered with all its contradictions intact. The duets, the television episodes, the framed dry-cleaning receipt, and “I Will Always Love You” are what remain of it. They are worth keeping.

At Classic Country TV, our goal is simple: keep the stories behind the songs alive. This one ended with a goodbye song and a bedside visit, and both of them meant it.

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Also on Classic Country TV: See every Dolly Parton story on Classic Country TV in one collection. Dolly Parton — The Complete CCTV Collection

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Gear Inspired by the Story

The Book and the Record

Dolly on Dolly: Interviews and Encounters with Dolly Parton
Randy L. Schmidt gathered five decades of Dolly’s interviews, including the years when she was still Porter’s partner and the years when she was explaining why she left. Reading them in order is like watching the whole story unfold in real time.
See it on Amazon →

The Essential Porter Wagoner and Dolly Parton
Twenty tracks from the duet years, including “The Last Thing on My Mind,” “Just Someone I Used to Know,” “If Teardrops Were Pennies,” and their only No. 1, “Please Don’t Stop Loving Me.”
See it on Amazon →

Bar and Whiskey

Godinger Dublin Crystal Whiskey Decanter
A cut-crystal decanter with a tall stopper that looks right at home on a Nashville sideboard. Pour something slow and put the duet records on.
See it on Amazon →

Glencairn Whisky Glass, Set of 4
The standard tasting glass for bourbon and whiskey, made in Scotland. A set of four, for when the whole band comes over after the show.
See it on Amazon →

Western Style

Colter Co. 4-Pack Paisley Bandanas
USA-made cotton bandanas in the classic paisley pattern. One size fits everybody, and they have been part of a country performer’s kit since before television.
See it on Amazon →

Wentur Western Bolo Tie with Genuine Leather Cord
A cow-skull bolo on a genuine leather cord, adjustable to fit. Nobody will mistake it for a Nudie suit, but Porter would have approved of the spirit.
See it on Amazon →

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From the CCTV Shop

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Sources

Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, Porter Wagoner profile The Hall’s biography of Wagoner, adapted from Steve Eng’s entry in The Encyclopedia of Country Music, covering the television show, the duet catalog, and his role producing Dolly’s RCA records. https://www.countrymusichalloffame.org/hall-of-fame/porter-wagoner

Tennessee Encyclopedia, “The Porter Wagoner Show” The Tennessee Historical Society’s entry on the show, including the singers Wagoner auditioned before hiring Dolly and the business ties between them at the time she left. https://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entries/the-porter-wagoner-show/

Billboard, March 31, 1979 Billboard’s contemporary report on Wagoner’s $3 million lawsuit against Dolly Parton. https://www.worldradiohistory.com/Archive-All-Music/Billboard/70s/1979/Billboard%201979-03-31.pdf

Grand Ole Opry, Porter Wagoner artist page The Opry’s history of Wagoner’s career, including the show’s run and the CMA duo awards he won with Dolly in 1970 and 1971. https://www.opry.com/artists/porter-wagoner

American Songwriter (June 12, 2026) A look back at Dolly’s June 12, 1973, recording of “I Will Always Love You” at RCA Studio B and the song’s later life. https://americansongwriter.com/on-this-day-in-1973-dolly-parton-recorded-a-three-time-no-1-that-became-one-of-the-best-selling-singles-in-history/

NPR, Dolly Parton obituary (August 25, 2026) NPR’s obituary covering Dolly’s death at 80 and her career from the Porter Wagoner years forward. https://www.npr.org/2026/08/25/nx-s1-3650175/dolly-parton-obituary

West Plains Downtown, Dolly & Porter Days The event page for the October 2–3, 2026, festival in Porter Wagoner’s hometown honoring his connection to Dolly Parton. https://www.westplainsdowntown.com/events/dolly-porter-fest

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Frequently Asked Questions