In 1969, Dolly Parton’s fourth album, My Blue Ridge Mountain Boy, featured a cover of Elvis Presley‘s 1961 Mac Davis-penned hit “In the Ghetto” and Joe South’s “Games People Play,” along with Jan Howard “We Had All the Good Things Going” and collaborator and mentor Porter Wagoner’s “Big Wind,” and some of her own personal stories, including the title track.
“My Blue Ridge Mountain Boy” started out as a story about one of Parton’s cousins who left the Blue Ridge Mountains in search of a better life. She moved to New York City to pursue a modeling career, and became an escort instead.
“She worked in the prostitution business for years and years and years,” said Parton in her 2000 book Songteller. “She eventually met someone, like the Julia Roberts character in ‘Pretty Woman.’ She later married and had a wonderful life. She turned out to be a wonderful person. But that’s where I started from to make up that song’s story.”
The song, which Parton later re-recorded as the title song for her 1982 album Heartbreak Express, is told sung the perspective of a young woman who leaves home and longs for the sweetness of the boyfriend she left behind. But it was not the only song Parton had written about the life of an escort.
When composing the music for her 1982 film The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, Parton penned another song that never made it into the film or on the soundtrack.
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“A Gamble Either Way”
Parton’s solemn piano ballad, “A Gamble Either Way,” tells the story of a girl who was dealt nothing but bad luck all her life and turned to a life of prostitution.
On a dust road at 15 in a yellow cotton dress
With the desert sun like an angry dragon breathing down my neck
And the dry, cracked plains would make me think of a prehistoric time
Or should I fear what lay before me less than what I’d left behind
A 15-year-old girl don’t have no trouble hitching rides
But sometimes when you’re riding free
You’ll pay the highest price
On back roads and in back seats
And in a cheap highway motel
But what’s a few more strangers in a life of nothing else
Though the deck is stacked against you
Win or lose, you have to play
The hand life has dealt you
And it’s a gamble either way
16 caught me crying, underneath the scarlet light
On the doorsteps of a stranger on a cold and rainy night
When I walked into the parlour here
Other pieces seemed to fit
I was good at pleasing strangers
So I made the most of it
The song was ultimately cut from the soundtrack to The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, along with another track she had written for the film, “Where Stallions Run,” making room for some of Parton’s “Sneakin Around,” her 1973 classic “I Will Always Love You,” and other songs she performed in the film.
A year after the release of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, Parton featured “A Gamble Either Way” on her 25th album, Burlap & Satin, which went to No. 5 on the Country chart. Later that year, Parton and Kenny Rogers released their megahit duet “Islands in the Stream,” which gave her a second crossover No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 following “9 to 5” in 1980.
Photo: R. Diamond/Getty Images
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