Dolly Parton Wrote This Track After Experiencing a Painful Breakup That Had Nothing To Do With a Boyfriend

Creative collaborations are tough. The emotional nuances of balancing two or more people’s hearts, minds, and egos can be just as tricky as navigating a marriage. In some cases, it can even be more difficult, because these dynamics feel just as important but have less of a standard framework from which all sides can work. Take, for example, Dolly Parton and Porter Wagoner. The two were never lovers, yet the end of their collaborative relationship seemed to embody all the same passion, heartache, and resentment as a bitter divorce.

Their split came seven years after Parton got her first big break on the Porter Wagoner Show. She and Wagoner fit together like two perfect, blonde-beehived puzzle pieces. They released thirteen studio albums together and achieved even more No. 1 hits on the country charts. But as Parton’s solo singer-songwriter career started to take off in the 1970s, her relationship with Wagoner began to falter.

Parton and Wagoner’s dynamic soon became overtaken by what she described as “greed, spite, possessiveness, jealousy, fear, even hate at times” in her autobiography. Eventually, Parton quit Wagoner’s show, and the pair parted ways—likely both a little relieved to get a break from their constant fighting. The day that Parton left Wagoner’s office after settling their business deals and finalizing their “breakup,” she began writing a song about the entire debacle.

By the time she pulled up to her house on Crockett Road, it was finished.

Dolly Parton Wrote Multiple Songs About Porter Wagoner

Dolly Parton had a great deal of respect and love for Porter Wagoner. But it was clear that their time together had to come to an end. Still, this realization made the process no less heartbreaking for either party. In her autobiography, Parton described driving away from Wagoner’s office that fateful day. “It began to rain. So did I,” she wrote. “I cried, not so much out of a sense of loss, but from the pain that almost always comes with change. It was a sad kind of freedom.”

Then, Parton began to sing. “Everything’s gonna be all right that’s been all wrong / And I can see the light of a clear blue morning.” “I swear to you on my life, the sky cleared up, it stopped raining, the sun came out, and before I got home, I had written the song ‘Light Of A Clear Blue Morning’,” Parton wrote. “It was my song of deliverance. It was my song of freedom.”

In a way, Parton argued, her decision to part ways with Wagoner professionally was the only way she would be able to maintain what lingering love she had for her former boss. Although their relationship was never the same as it was in those early years, Parton and Wagoner managed to put those struggles behind them and work together in the decades that followed. One of Parton’s biggest hits, “I Will Always Love You”, was about Wagoner and the “special, although painfully heart-wrenching, time we spent together.”

“I can’t speak for Porter,” Parton wrote. “But I truly believe I have become a wiser and better person for the growth I accomplished during those difficult years.”

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