Merle Haggard and Dolly Parton 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, since 1966.

While Dolly’s been known to play it coy in the media in terms of admitting or denying she ever had any sort of extramarital affair, she did go on the record to say that she never had an affair with Merle, specifically after people began speculating about the possibility because of a certain song in particular.

In her 2020 book, Dolly Parton, Songteller: My Life in Lyrics, she wrote this about him:

“Merle Haggard was a special, special person. I heard he had a crush on me. All I knew was that we had a great relationship. When I was on the road with Porter’s show, we traveled some together.

Merle would ride on my bus sometimes, and we’d play card games together. We just had a really good time. But I never thought about him romantically.”

Unfortunately for Merle though, Dolly hit him with the ultimate friend-zone move, saying he reminded her of her brother, Denver:

“We never had an affair or anything like that. We were just buddies, as far as I was concerned. He reminded me of my brother Denver, so I really related to him. We had a good time, and we loved each other’s music.”

It’s rumored that he initially fell in love with her while recording her 1975 song, “Kentucky Gambler,” which he covered that same year for his Keep Movin’ On album. They also toured together in the mid-’70s, and Merle has admitted publicly before to writing his song, “Always Wanting You,” about his deep love for Dolly. To him, it was much more than a friendship kind of love, but clearly Dolly never felt the same way about him.

But Dolly didn’t completely ice him out… she actually wrote a song for Merle, too. And it was indeed a love song… well, his love for trains.

During their time on the road together, Dolly found out about Merle’s fondness for trains and wrote the perfect song for him, which he used as the title track of his twentieth album in 1976, My Love Affair With Trains. While it’s a great song, you have to imagine that was another attempt at wooing or impressing Dolly…

Merle’s father, Jim, was a carpenter for the Santa Fe Railroad and died when the country singer was 9 years old, and so his love for locomotives started at a very young age. He was also raised in a converted boxcar in Oildale, California, making his connection to them extremely personal. Speaking with NPR in 1995, Merle explained why the railroads and trains were so important to him:

“But railroads were, you know, very influential in my life. And there was enough of it in the songs that I admired to get me on the freight myself. I thought, well, this is something I got to do. If they’re going to write songs about it, I got to go see why. S

o I did, and I rode freights wherever they took me. I rode them for a block, or I’d ride them 200 miles. Or I think the longest trip I ever took was from San Antonio to El Paso – I think, was the longest one.”

Actually, after he became a star, Merle bought his own railway observation car, which is now part of the Virginia Scenic Railway that you can ride yourself.

So while Dolly may not have felt romantically attracted to Merle, she was a happily married woman long before they met, it’s clear that she did have a deep love for him as a friend and person, and I’d like to think her writing this song about something that meant so much to him was her way of showing it.

But still, you have to love Merle pouring his heart out with a song like “Always Wanting You,” and then Dolly eventually returning the favor with “My Love Affair With Trains,” which is a great song, I’m certainly not knocking it, but still… it’s just funny to see she returned the favor with a song about trains. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that he chose to use that as the albums title track, and I only wish they would’ve done more together in terms of recording a real duet or something.

Though maybe that would’ve been too much considering Merle was already in love with her and everybody knew it…

Either way, Dolly put on a masterclass in how to friend zone in the kindest, most wholesome way possible, and she did it with a beautiful song that I’m sure meant a lot to Merle.