She sat down and wrote the song.
She performed it for him and he cried and said something to the effect of, “That’s the prettiest song I ever heard, and you can go as long as I get to produce it.
” She left the show in 1974.
He sued her anyway in 1979 for what was reported at the time as roughly $3 million over the terms of their agreements.
It settled in 1980.
Two things about that song are worth holding on to.
First, she wrote her way out of a business trap using tenderness as the instrument.
The man she was escaping wept at the sound of his own dismissal.
Second, she kept the copyright.
Keep that.
Now, the other song from that same period, and the one that shattered the wall around the marriage more than anything else in her catalog.
Jolene came out in 1973.
A woman begs a red-haired beauty not to take her man.
It became one of the most covered songs in American music, and it did something Dolly almost never permitted.
It invited the public directly into her bedroom.
She has explained the origin many times and the explanation has stayed remarkably stable.
There was a bank teller in Nashville with a crush on Carl.
He enjoyed going to the bank.
She has described it as a running joke between them.
She’d tell him he was spending an awful lot of time at that bank and she didn’t believe they had that kind of money.
In her telling, it’s an innocent song that sounds like a dreadful one.
But note how she handled the rumor.
She didn’t kill it.
At concerts, she told audiences she had put a stop to Carl going to that bank.
She let the flirtation with scandal breathe because a hint of jealousy made the marriage feel real to people who had never seen it, and because a song is a better hiding place than a denial.
Meanwhile, the house on Wedgwood Avenue was filling up with children who weren’t hers.
As the money came in, she began bringing younger siblings down from the mountains to live with her and Carl and go to school in Nashville.
