T
he
C
omplete
R
ecordings
1967 - 1976
by Alanna Nash
Just Between You And Me
Each of the above pairings had its own distinc-
tive characteristics. If George and Tammy commu-
nicated drama and passion, and Conway and
Loretta old-fashioned sass and fun, Porter and Dolly
focused on a mix of playfulness and poignancy.
Though RCA staff member Bob Ferguson is listed as
their producer (with Jerry Bradley handling over-
dubs years later), Ferguson's credit was only a for-
mality. (RCA insisted on using only 'in-house'
employees.) Porter was the real producer and mas-
termind of the sessions – Ferguson was generally not
even in the building – and the duets point up
Porter's width of musical scope and greatness as a
producer.
From the beginning of their professional rela-
tionship, Porter and Dolly concentrated on smart
song choices, recording music that flirted outside
the strict country lines (their first release,
The Last
Thing On My Mind
, from folksinger Tom Paxton,
worked a folk-acoustic vibe with a lyric that refer-
enced a subway rumbling underground, and earned
them a top-ten hit), even as they were always quick
to mix in non-commercial songs of real tragedies,
family estrangements, gospel fervor, and Dolly's
gothic, Appalachian-soaked ballads of sick or dying
children (
Jeannie's Afraid Of The Dark, Silver Sandals,
Malena
, which Porter laced with mournful recita-
tion). By the second year of recording, they were
recording such wide-ranging material as Dan
Penn's
The Dark End Of The Street
, which oozed Mem-
phis Soul, and the social commentary of Tom T.
Hall's
I Washed My Face In The Morning Dew
.
However, they wrote much of their material
themselves, with Porter immediately showcasing
Dolly's songs on the first sessions. (Her magnificent
heartbreak ballad,
Put It Off Until Tomorrow
which
she co-wrote with her uncle, Bill Owens, and which
Bill Phillips had already taken to number six on the
charts, was on the schedule for their third day of
recording in the fall of 1967.) They instinctively
knew just how far to push their subject matter, how
vulnerable to take their delivery, and what worked
well for their two voices. In short, when they stood
before a microphone, they created magic.
Where so many duet singers follow a predictable
pattern, Porter and Dolly mixed things up. If Porter
was content to let Dolly handle lead, he would often
trade lead melodic lines with her to keep the sound
fresh. Then he supported her with harmony on the
chorus to give the song an extra lift. As a solo
singer, Porter's earnest baritone could soar to a sus-
tained mid-to-low tenor, and then plunge to its low-
est depths, just as Dolly's gossamer soprano could
laser in on a straight-ahead melody for storytelling,
then leap to ethereal trills and frothy curlicues. But
as a team, their hand-in-glove, close-fitting har-
monies became their trademark. Listeners ate it up.
By the time they ended the duets in the 1970s,
they'd scored twenty-one hit collaborations, includ-
ing
We'll Get Ahead Someday
(1968),
Just Someone I
Used to Know
(1969),
Better Move It On Home
(1971),
The Right Combination
(1972),
Please Don't Stop Lov-
ing Me
(1974), and
Making Plans
(1980).
With the release of their first album, 'Just Be-
tween You And Me' in 1968, it was the tightness of
their sound that impressed almost everyone who
heard it. The naturalness of their vocal blend –
what Dolly called
"family"
and Porter referred to as
"blood harmony"
– was equally matched by their
I
n the pantheon of great male-female country duet teams, three acts proudly
stand center stage: George Jones and Tammy Wynette, Conway Twitty and
Loretta Lynn, and Porter Wagoner and Dolly Parton, the latter rising in 1967 (pre-
dating their rivals by roughly four years) and lasting through seven years and
thirteen albums, some released even after the pair no longer performed together.
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