Just like pretty much everybody else in the world, Merle Haggard once had a crush on Dolly Parton.
We here at Whiskey Riff often wonder what Jolene had to look like for Dolly Parton to be worried about her stealing her man. Dolly has, across decades, been an icon that women and men adore. She’s still a hot item according to Zac Brown, and back in the heyday of the 70s, Dolly was a certified heartbreaker.
For proof, just look to two songs that Merle Haggard penned during a brief period where he was falling head-over-heels for the country music star. If you’ve ever heard the two songs “I’ve Got A Yearning” and “Always Wanting You” by Haggard, those are both about Dolly… and Merle announced that to the world during a Ralph Emery On The Record interview.
The show might not have lasted long (it ran from 1993 to 1995), but it provided some great, long-form interviews with some of the biggest names in country music. In this particular conversation, Emery got around to asking Merle about his relationship with Dolly Parton. He even pointed out that in Merle’s book, Sing Me Back Home, he had written this about Dolly:
“I was like a schoolboy. I could have carved ‘Merle loves Dolly’ on every tree in the country if she asked me to.”
Haggard admitted to falling in love with Parton during the 1970s, when the two were particularly close and helped one another out with music. Merle even recalled the late night that turned into an early morning when he wrote two songs about his feelings for Parton – “I’ve Got A Yearning” and “Always Wanting You” – and tried to call her at 3:30 in the morning to play her one of them:
“It was about 3 o’clock in the morning. I was at Harrah’s Casino, it must have been 1974. I wrote two songs that night, and both of them are about her. We were using each other for soundboards at the time. I didn’t have any intentions of ever making anything happen out of this love. I knew it was absolutely impossible…
But we could write songs. And so I wrote these two songs: ‘Always Wanting You’ and ‘I’ve Got A Yearning.’ Around 3:30 a.m. my time, I called her house and some lady answered. I said, ‘Is Dolly asleep?’ She said, ‘She sure is.’ I said, ‘Well would you go wake her up? I’ve got a song that I’ve been working on all night and I know she wants to hear it.’”
The woman who answered eventually got Dolly on the phone after some additional pestering from Haggard, but that’s all that we got from the rest of the story. Merle went on to speak highly of Parton, saying that when she first broke into the country music scene, some had trouble looking past the “facade” of her big hair and… well, he mentioned other things. Merle clearly knew her on a deeper level, and that’s made evident by listening to the two songs he wrote and woke her up for.
