Watching Dolly perform “I Will Always Love You” on The Porter Wagoner Show in 1974 can induce an itchy feeling, like the minutes before school lets out for summer vacation. See Dolly’s jittery hands at the end of the video—fretting with her sleeves, smoothing out the sequins on her dress, clasping and unclasping her fingers—and recall the simile she used in her 1977 song “Light of a Clear Blue Morning” to describe herself during that period: like a captured eagle. Many have written that “I Will Always Love You” was Dolly’s way to “soften the blow” of leaving Wagoner. Its lyrics feel familiar to any woman who has sloughed off an unwanted boyfriend using calculated self-deprecation: “I would only be in your way” and “We both know I’m not what you need” are lines I’ve probably used verbatim.
There’s a level of irony baked into Dolly’s words here. By the mid-’70s, it was Wagoner who needed Dolly, who sued her for $1 million in 1979, who claimed he was entitled to a percentage of her earnings, who accused her of stealing demos from his production company’s office, and who called her “the kind of person that I would never trust with anything of mine.” Getting out ahead of Wagoner’s bitch-fit with a song called “I Will Always Love You” suddenly seems like exceptionally smart PR for Dolly—her sincerity is her alibi. But you can imagine how incensed Wagoner might have been, especially if you’re cynical enough to float the idea that Dolly wrote the song not as a heartfelt tribute but as a wile to court the public while committing treason backstage.
The problem with this paranoid hypothesis? Dolly did always love Wagoner. When the IRS came for his assets in the 1980s, she bought the rights to his songs to help him stay afloat, later returning them to him gratis (“The songs are on the way, but I’ll accept none of your money,” Wagoner recalled her saying in a 2004 interview). At a celebration of his 50 years as a Grand Ole Opry member in 2007, Dolly closed the night by once again singing “I Will Always Love You” directly to him—this time, before a much larger audience, many of whom I suspect went misty-eyed. Six months after this taping, Wagoner lay on his deathbed in Nashville. “One of the last people he saw on this Earth,” testified country singer Marty Stuart on Dolly Parton’s America, “was a girl named Dolly.”
Shortly after news of Dolly’s own death broke a few days ago, I relayed this story to my roommate, and detected a whiff of annoyance—or was it protectiveness?—in her crossed arms and unsmiling expression. I could tell what she was thinking: Why would Dolly do all that for the guy who’d put her through hell? Perhaps in 2026, these kinds of stories—men throwing tantrums, women mending fences—are no longer feel-good, no longer inspirational. “Forgiveness is all there is,” Dolly once said—it’s a declaration befitting a woman nicknamed Saint Dolly for her charity, championing of LGBTQ rights, funding of literacy programs, and attitude of love and acceptance toward all. But there’s a more colloquial usage of “saint,” one that feels less complimentary: That woman is a saint! you might say of someone who puts up with bullshit you’d never tolerate. In an era when excusing male hostilities finally feels more like a prerogative than the mandate of patriarchy, it’s understandable that the forgiving approach might come across as overtolerance, or even enablement.
