Merle Haggard was in love with Dolly Parton… but who wasn’t.
This week, Dolly Parton’s family announced that the country music icon had passed away at 80-years-old in Nashville Tennessee. Dolly had been dealing with undisclosed health issues for the last year or so, and she previously shared that she was having issues with severe kidney stones. Aside from that, she understandably didn’t share more, though clearly there were more serious issues going on.
Dolly’s rep confirmed to People, that Dolly’s death sadly followed a “brief battle with cancer,” though the specific kind was not revealed. Dolly had been open about her health struggles over the last several months, though it sounds like the cancer was a more recent development.
She passed “surrounded by loved ones,” as reported by her family:
“After bravely facing a brief battle with cancer, Dolly departed her Earthly life today at the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center surrounded by loved ones.”
It sounds like it was a quick battle, so we can only hope that she didn’t suffer too much and is now in the loving arms of her Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, as she was very open about her faith throughout her life. Of course, she leaves an enduring and incomparable legacy, and there are just so many great stories about her that the world deserves to hear.
And this one about Merle is one of my favorites…
Dolly On Her Friendship With Merle
The two country icons were good friends for decades, all the way until Merle’s passing in 2016, but it’s no secret that Merle was in love with her, and he was very open about it. Merle was married five times, but his marriage to his last wife, Theresa Ann Lane, lasted from 1993 until he passed away in 2016. Dolly, on the other hand, was married to the same man, her husband Carl Dean, since 1966.
While Dolly’s been known to play it coy in the media in terms of admitting or denying she ever had any sort of extramarital affair (and I HIGHLY doubt she ever did), she did go on the record to say that she never had an affair with Merle, specifically after people began speculating about the possibility because of a certain song in particular. She also confirmed that she never had an intimate relationship with Burt Reynolds, but that’s another story…
In her 2020 book, Dolly Parton, Songteller: My Life in Lyrics, she wrote this about him:
“Merle Haggard was a special, special person. I heard he had a crush on me. All I knew was that we had a great relationship. When I was on the road with Porter’s show, we traveled some together.
Merle would ride on my bus sometimes, and we’d play card games together. We just had a really good time. But I never thought about him romantically.”
Unfortunately for Merle though, Dolly hit him with the ultimate friend-zone move, saying he reminded her of her brother, Denver:
“We never had an affair or anything like that. We were just buddies, as far as I was concerned. He reminded me of my brother Denver, so I really related to him. We had a good time, and we loved each other’s music.”
OOF… nothing worse than reminding a woman you’re in love with of her brother…
It’s rumored that he initially fell in love with her while recording her 1975 song, “Kentucky Gambler,” which he covered that same year for his Keep Movin’ On album. They also toured together in the mid-’70s, and Merle has admitted publicly before to writing his song, “Always Wanting You,” about his deep love for Dolly. To him, it was much more than a friendship kind of love, but clearly Dolly never felt the same way about him.
Merle Pens A Song About Her
In his book Sing Me Back Home, Merle wrote this about Dolly:
“I was like a schoolboy. I could have carved ‘Merle loves Dolly’ on every tree in the country if she asked me to.”
Haggard admitted to falling in love with Parton during the 1970s, when the two were particularly close and helped one another out with music. Merle even recalled the late night that turned into an early morning when he wrote two songs about his feelings for Parton “Always Wanting You,” which is the one we’ve heard the most about over the years, as well as “I’ve Got A Yearning.”
And he tried to call her at 3:30 in the morning to play her one of them:
“It was about 3 o’clock in the morning. I was at Harrah’s Casino, it must have been 1974. I wrote two songs that night, and both of them are about her. We were using each other for soundboards at the time. I didn’t have any intentions of ever making anything happen out of this love. I knew it was absolutely impossible…
But we could write songs. And so I wrote these two songs: ‘Always Wanting You’ and ‘I’ve Got A Yearning.’ Around 3:30 a.m. my time, I called her house and some lady answered. I said, ‘Is Dolly asleep?’ She said, ‘She sure is.’ I said, ‘Well would you go wake her up? I’ve got a song that I’ve been working on all night and I know she wants to hear it.’”
The woman who answered eventually got Dolly on the phone after some additional pestering from Haggard, but that’s all that we got from the rest of the story. I have to imagine Dolly was gracious and flattered, though, and we all know what a kind soul she was.
“Always Wanting You” by himself, and it was released as the second single from his aforementioned album, Keep Movin’ On. Pretty bold move It’s a very honest, and pretty dang sad, admission about his love for Dolly and how he ultimately knew it could never be:
“Always wanting you, but never having you,
Makes it hard to face tomorrow ’cause I,
Know I’ll be wanting you again,
Always loving you but never touching you,
Sometimes hurts me almost more than I can stand.”
I mean, a complete heartbreaker. While he knew them ever being together was a total impossibility, Merle was a man of action, and he wasn’t afraid to wear his heart on his sleeve, so to speak, and I respect that he did it in a pretty respectful way. I truly don’t think there’s a man on this earth who wasn’t in love with Dolly Parton…
Dolly Returns The Favor
But of course, Dolly being Dolly, she didn’t completely ice him out… she actually wrote a song for Merle, too. And it was indeed a love song… well, about his love for trains.
During their time on the road together, Dolly found out about Merle’s fondness for trains and wrote the perfect song for him, which he used as the title track of his twentieth album in 1976, My Love Affair With Trains. While it’s a great song, you have to imagine that was another attempt at wooing or impressing Dolly…
Merle’s father, Jim, was a carpenter for the Santa Fe Railroad and died when the country singer was 9 years old, and so his love for locomotives started at a very young age. He was also raised in a converted boxcar in Oildale, California, making his connection to them extremely personal. Speaking with NPR in 1995, Merle explained why the railroads and trains were so important to him:
“But railroads were, you know, very influential in my life. And there was enough of it in the songs that I admired to get me on the freight myself. I thought, well, this is something I got to do. If they’re going to write songs about it, I got to go see why.
So I did, and I rode freights wherever they took me. I rode them for a block, or I’d ride them 200 miles. Or I think the longest trip I ever took was from San Antonio to El Paso – I think, was the longest one.”
Actually, after he became a star, Merle bought his own railway observation car, which is now part of the Virginia Scenic Railway that you can ride yourself.
So while Dolly may not have felt romantically attracted to Merle, she was a happily married woman long before they met, it’s clear that she did have a deep love for him as a friend and person, and I’d like to think her writing this song about something that meant so much to him was her way of showing it.
But still, you have to love Merle pouring his heart out with a song like “Always Wanting You,” and then Dolly eventually returning the favor with “My Love Affair With Trains.” It is a great song, I’m certainly not knocking it, but still… it’s just funny to see she returned the favor with a song about trains. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that he chose to use that as the albums title track, and I only wish they would’ve done more together in terms of recording a real duet or something.
Either way, Dolly put on a masterclass in how to friend zone in the kindest, most wholesome way possible, and she did it with a beautiful song that I’m sure meant a lot to Merle.
Check it out:
“Always Wanting You”
“I’ve Got A Yearning”
Dolly and Merle performed a medley of his songs on her show in 1988, and it’s really a treasure considering they’re now both gone:
