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Dolly Parton & Porter Wagoner
personal chemistry and the glitter and glitz (Dolly
called it
"gaude"
) of their stage costumes. However
over-the-top Porter's rhinestone Nudie (and
Manuel) suits seemed to some, to country people of
their generations, Porter and Dolly's onstage finery
represented a symbolic act of shaking the farm dirt
off their boots and stepping into the modern world.
And beneath Dolly's flash and
"trash,"
as she called
her look, beat the heart of a hillbilly savant.
"The quality of their sugar-and-vinegar duet work is
often underestimated,"
the late Martha Hume ob-
served,
"because their rhinestone-encrusted appearance
was so spectacular. But their success made 'Porter 'n'
Dolly' a household phrase."
D
uet teams were nothing new in
country music when Porter and
Dolly first met at RCA's Studio B on October 10-
12, 1967 to lay down twelve songs. The 1930s pro-
duced a plethora of harmony duos, from the
prominent sibling acts of Bill and Charlie Mon-
roe and the Carlisle Brothers (both of which later
parted to pursue separate careers), to the married
couple of Lulu Belle and Scotty Wiseman, who
logged a quarter century on the National Barn
Dance, the popular radio show over Chicago's
powerful WLS. Other influential duos followed in
the 1940s and 1950s, including the Louvin Broth-
ers and the bluegrass teams of Flatt & Scruggs
and the Stanley Brothers.
However, the male-female combination allowed
not only for novelties and folk songs, but in the late
1960s, modern songs of love conquered and di-
vided. In January 1968, when Porter and Dolly
recorded Jerry Chesnut's pathos-ridden
Holding On
To Nothin'
, Porter suggesting they draw out some of
the syllables to amp up the pain of the lyric, the two
singers established that they had come to stay.
Critic John Morthland wrote that the performance
was the most dramatic, urgent, and sorrowful of
their collaborations to date. From this one recording
alone, Morthland declared,
"They made all the other
duet teams sound like footnotes."
Today, writer-musician Jon D. Weisberger, re-
flecting on the George-Tammy, Conway-Loretta,
Porter-Dolly triad, points out that the bluegrass
music training Porter received with one of his first
bands, the Blue Ridge Boys, helped him wring the
utmost emotion from a vocal.
"He might not have
been the only one in those duets to use the low tenor,"
Weisberger says,
"but he used it more consistently and
more smartly than just about anyone else in a male-
female country duo until Royce Kendall [of The
Kendalls] came along. 'Holding On To Nothin'' is about
as good a duet record as you'll ever hear."
The Country Music Association agreed that the
two had
The Right Combination
, as Porter titled a
song and album from 1972, voting them the Vocal
Group of the Year in 1968, 1970, and 1971. But after
that, Conway and Loretta (
After The Fire Is Gone
)
and George and Tammy (
We're Gonna Hold On)
were
hot on their trail, singing songs that suggested a
true-life romantic entanglement, which was cer-
tainly true in the case of Jones and Wynette, who
had become husband and wife.
From a purely vocal standpoint, however, Porter
and Dolly's challengers couldn't touch them. As
Duane Gordon, editor and publisher at 'Dollyma-
nia.net: The Online Dolly Parton Newsmagazine,'
puts it,
"Those duos sounded good together, but they
didn't sound as tight vocally when they sang together.
When Conway and Loretta sang, you heard Conway
Twitty sing and Loretta Lynn sing. When George and
Tammy sang, you heard George Jones sing and Tammy
Wynette sing. When Porter and Dolly sang, you heard
Porter and Dolly."
