He wasn’t shy about it, that’s for sure.
Very sadly, country queen Dolly Parton passed away at 80-years-old in Nashville Tennessee on Tuesday. 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 it has since been revealed that she suffered a “brief battle with cancer.”
There have been tons of great Dolly stories shared since her passing, I could go on and on because she lived such an incredible life, but one of the coolest, lesser-known facts about Dolly and her fellow country icon Merle Haggard is that Merle was in love with Dolly, and he wrote not one but two songs about it, “Always Wanting You” and “I’ve Got A Yearning.”
Haggard admitted to falling in love with Parton during the 1970s, when the two were particularly close and helped one another out with music, and you can read much more in-depth about it HERE. 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, for nearly 60 years, as they got married in 1966.
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.”
I mean, fair enough…
And during a sit down interview with Ralph Emery back in 1998 for On The Record, Emery brought up that Merle fell in love with Dolly once, to which he replied:
“Oh yeah, didn’t everybody?”
I mean, can’t argue with that…
He then went on to tell the story about how the songs got written, during a two week stand he was doing at Harrah’s around the year 1974. He and Dolly were bouncing musical ideas off of each other at the time, and he finished the two he wrote for her at 3 AM one night, and called her around 5:30 Nashville time because he wanted to play them for her.
Merle admitted that he knew nothing in terms of a “love affair” would ever happen with Dolly, it simply wasn’t in the cards and there was nothing they could do about it, but they “could write songs”:
“Yeah, it was about 3 o’clock in the morning, I was at Harrah’s working a two week stand. And it must’ve been 1974, and I wrote two songs that night and both of them are about her.
We were using each other for sound boards at the time. I didn’t have any intentions of ever make anything happen out of this love affair, you know, it was absolutely impossible. I knew that she couldn’t help it, I couldn’t help it, and we had to go different directions and that was that. But we could write songs.
And so I wrote these two songs, ‘Always Wanting You’ one night up there by myself after I got off work. About 3:30 my time, which must’ve been around 5:30 here, I called her house.”
One of Dolly’s assistants answered the phone and told him Dolly was asleep and she would call him back in the morning once she was up. Well, Merle wouldn’t take no for an answer, and he insisted that Dolly be woken up.
Eventually, the assistant gave in, and Merle said that Dolly was just “infectious” when she got to the phone:
“And then some lady answered and I said, ‘Is Dolly asleep?’ She said, ‘She sure is.’ I said, ‘Would you go wake her up?’ She said, ‘Oh, I wouldn’t wanna do that.’ I said, ‘I got a song I was working on all night, I know she wants to hear it. It’s about her.’ ‘Well why don’t you call in the morning, and we’ll play it for her?’
She said, ‘She’s way down in underneath the cover.’ I said, ‘Well, you go way down underneath the cover and wake her up.’ So she got her on the phone, she came to the phone, she was infectious.”
Merle then went a little deeper, talking about a side of Dolly that most people never got to see. Of course, she got a lot of attention for her obvious good looks and incredible talent, but Merle says, unless you’ve had breakfast with Dolly, or been around her in a normal setting, most people “never really got to see the beauty that she contained”:
“You know, the thing about Dolly, I’m gonna say something here that maybe has not been said about her. There was so much facade when she walked out that people that didn’t get to see her at breakfast never really got to see the beauty that she contained.
The wig, and there was always so much focus on the on the boobs and all that. And she was a person underneath all of that that the public knew about that was rare. She had this unbelievable talent for a one-on-one guitar pulling. I mean, she could sit there and sing you songs that she wrote since she was five and knock you out.”
I’ve read his quotes about it and hers too, but seeing the actual interview is incredible. The way he talks about her really is heart-melting, and it’s clear just how much he admired her for the woman she was, not just her looks and things of that nature. It’s really all a woman could want, for someone to really see her for who she is, and that never went away for Merle, I don’t think. We all know Dolly, she is incredibly authentic, but obviously, she’s a real person behind the cameras and I can only imagine what a treat it was for people like Merle to get to see that side of her, too Clearly it was just as special.
I imagine, for both of them, it was hard to connect with people on a very real level because they were so famous and so many people wanted their attention all the time, and I think they found solace in a friendship where they could both be themselves.
And even though it was never romantic, I think there was a lot of love there, and we got some great songs out of it, too:
You have to hear both songs, too:
“Always Wanting You”
“I’ve Got A Yearning”
