Her early breakthrough came in 1967 when she was hired as the “girl singer” on The Porter Wagoner Show, a TV showcase for country singer Porter Wagoner that reached millions of viewers each week.
Together, they released 21 hit duets including Just Someone I Used to Know, If Teardrops Were Pennies and Please Don’t Stop Loving Me.
But as Parton’s star rose, she began to outshine her co-star. Eventually, she realised she needed to strike out as a solo artist – writing I Will Always Love You as a letter of apology to her former mentor. He responded by suing her for breach of contract in 1979, demanding $3m (£2,2m).
Wanting to avoid a lengthy court battle, Parton settled for about $1m.
“I made up my mind that if he could live with it, I could live without it,” she wrote in her autobiography. “I suppose Porter has done all right with it. I am neither his conscience nor his accountant.”
It was typical of the star’s ability to radiate cheery goodwill that she never held a grudge against Wagoner, always crediting him with giving her a crucial career break, even after their relationship fell apart.
But she was nobody’s fool. Take, for example, the battle over the rights to I Will Always Love You.
After it hit number one in the country charts, Elvis Presley called – he loved the song and wanted to record a cover.
“You cannot imagine how excited I am about this,” she told him. “This is the greatest thing that’s ever happened to me as a songwriter.”
But the night before the recording session, his notoriously hard-nosed manager, Colonel Tom Parker, called Parton and told her Elvis wouldn’t record the song unless she handed over half of the lucrative publishing rights.
“I said, ‘Well, that throws a new light on this. Because I can’t give you half the publishing. I’m gonna leave that to my family,'” Parton told Reba McEntire’s podcast in 2020.
“And he said, ‘Well, then we can’t do it.’ And I cried all night.”
“I mean, it was like the worst thing,” she told Country Music Television. “People were saying, ‘You’re nuts. It’s Elvis Presley. Hell, I’d give him all of it.’
“I said, ‘I can’t.’ I always wondered what it would sound like. I know he would have killed it [in a good way].”