Get Your Tissues and Watch a Young Dolly Parton Join Porter Wagoner To Perform Their First Hit Duet in Their 1967 Grand Ole Opry Debut as a Duo

By late 1967, both Dolly Parton and Porter Wagoner had taken the Opry stage as solo acts. Parton performed on the show in July 1959, when she was 13 years old. Wagoner made his debut in January 1955 and became a member in 1957. However, the pair didn’t appear on the Opry as a duo until November 25, 1967. That night, they performed their first hit single, “The Last Thing on My Mind.”

The duo didn’t take long to make their way to the Opry. She made her first appearance on Wagoner’s TV show in September 1967. A month later, they released “The Last Thing on My Mind” as their debut duet. Their debut album, Just Between You and Me, dropped the following January.

By the time they took the festively decorated Grand Ole Opry stage, their first single had become their first hit. It peaked at No. 7 on the Billboard country chart. It was the first of many hit singles for the iconic duo.

Dolly Parton Recalls Joining The Porter Wagoner Show

Joining The Porter Wagoner Show and recording with the established star helped to launch Dolly Parton’s career. However, when she accepted the position at Wagoner’s “girl singer,” she was already forging her own path in Nashville.

At the time, she was working with Fred Foster at Combine Music and was recording for Monument Records. That didn’t last long, though. “I’d had a couple of chart records,” Parton recalled. “Porter had seen me on local TV, and people were talking about the new girl in town. That’s when he called me in. I had been sending him songs that I had been writing to Norma Jean and to Porter.” As a result, when she was invited to meet with Wagoner in his office, she thought he was going to cut some of her songs. However, when she arrived, he asked her to take Norma Jean’s place.

[RELATED: On This Day in 1988, One of Country Music’s Most Iconic Duos Performed Together for the First Time in More Than a Decade]

Wagoner knew he wanted to record with Parton. So, he worked to get her out of her contracts with Combine and Monument. “I don’t think he knew I was a writer. I don’t think he knew I was a lot of stuff that I turned out to be,” she said. “We had seven years, and we had a lot of duets–stuff that worked really well for us.”

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