Miss Me When I'm Gone

chapter 20



“Just Someone I Used to Know”

Nashville, Tennessee

I’m YouTubing past midnight in my motel after a day at the Ryman Auditorium and the Country Music Hall of Fame, eating a take-out slice of something called chess pie—a southern dessert that I’m afraid I simply don’t understand.

Sweeter than the pie, though, are Dolly and Porter, singing and giggling me into the wee hours.

Dolly Parton began working for The Porter Wagoner Show in 1967. Porter Wagoner was a popular country star in the midsixties and early seventies. He was about twenty years older than Dolly, and he had a distinctive look: tall and lanky, with a long, horsey face, a goofy smile, and a red-blond pompadour.

And then there were his suits—bright-colored suits covered in rhinestone wagon wheels and cacti. Called “Nudie” suits (after Nudie Cohn, the tailor who made them), they reportedly cost several thousand dollars each.

In her earliest days on the show, Dolly looks like a cute secretary: tailored outfits and stylish (if slightly large) hairdos. In front of the camera, the two singers laugh a lot together (Porter with an aw-shucks guffaw and Dolly with an easy giggle) and flirt in an irresistibly folksy kind of way:



Porter: Thank you, Dolly. Fine job. A beautiful song, and mighty, mighty well done. You want to sing a duet with me?

Dolly: Why, I’d just be tickled to death to.

Porter (snorting self-consciously): ’Kay.

Dolly: I thought you’d never ask.

Soon after Dolly joined Porter’s show, the pair began recording successful duets. But eventually things went somewhat sour between the two performers.

In a 1972 performance of one of their duets, “That Was Before I Met You,” you can see a hint of Dolly’s growing exasperation with her boss: She rolls her eyes at Porter’s corny hand gestures, making similar but vaguely mocking gestures back at him. She points her thumb irritably in his direction, with a facial expression that seems to say “I’m with Stupid.”

By this time, Dolly had tossed the cute secretary outfits and begun to take on the teased and top-heavy look that would become so iconic for decades to come. Her clothes were becoming more dramatic with each year on the show, her hair and figure more pronounced.

She was outgrowing Porter and his show. They apparently fought a great deal behind the scenes. While they had several duet albums together, Dolly was writing and cutting her own hits by then (such as “Joshua” and “Coat of Many Colors”) and starting to cross over into pop. Tension grew between Dolly and her boss. According to Dolly, Porter became possessive, attempting to control Dolly’s career decisions. Later, Dolly would admit that Porter often tried to put the moves on her. (In her biography, she describes watching Jim Henson give a Kermit the Frog performance on her variety show, and when her manager joked, “Isn’t it amazing the way Kermit can sing like that with somebody’s hand up his ass?,” she replied, “Shoot, that ain’t nothin’. I did that for seven years on The Porter Wagoner Show.”)

Knowing about all of the trouble doesn’t much taint my enjoyment of their performances—perhaps because we all know Dolly could handle it. My favorite of their duets is “Just Someone I Used to Know.” It is, predictably, about love lost, love missed, and the accompanying regrets. The premise of the song is being asked about an old picture, and replying that it’s “just someone I used to know,” while privately feeling pained by the memory. And I think the song may have been a little prophetic for Dolly and Porter. They parted bitterly when Dolly left Porter’s show in 1974, and later in the seventies, Porter sued Dolly over contractual issues. They eventually settled out of court.

Despite the troubles, Dolly wrote her hit song “I Will Always Love You” (probably more familiar to some for the Whitney Houston version) for Porter. Penned affectionately and not romantically, she wrote it in 1973, when she was in the process of leaving his show. And the pair made amends a few years after the settlement. In fact, Dolly, who’d purchased the rights to some of Porter’s songs while he was having financial difficulties, gave them right back to him. Dolly visited Porter when he was dying of lung cancer in 2007, and spoke and sang at his memorial service.

I can’t say how Dolly and Porter felt about each other in the end, but clearly they had a connection that time didn’t dissolve. I play “Just Someone” over and over again, trying to determine what about it makes me so damn sad—sadder than almost anything else on my classic country playlist. Maybe seeing Dolly so young and unsynthetic gives me a keen sensation of the cruel demands of time. Maybe looking at rhinestone wagon wheels simply makes me nostalgic for an era I never knew.

I’m still thinking of Dolly and Porter as I drift off to sleep, but when I wake up at 3 A.M. it’s Jeremy who’s on my mind. Where am I? What time is it? Where’s Jeremy? Do I miss him? I don’t know. I feel his absence, that’s for certain. Is that the same as missing someone? He was here with me for so long, and whatever happened to cause our parting, it’s unsettling that he’s not here anymore.

What does it mean to “used to know” a person? Is such a thing possible? Isn’t “knowing” a permanent state of affairs? Will I ever not know Jeremy? Or he not know me? I don’t think so. Clearly, though, we are about to become “just someones” to each other, rather than the fundamental someones we vowed to be a few years ago. And it seems to me so sad how easily this can happen—as much as we might want it to under some circumstances.

It happens all the time. People we thought we couldn’t live without move out of our lives, fade into mere Christmas-card correspondents or Facebook friends or nothing at all. We’re all free agents. No one is guaranteed to you forever—or even till tomorrow. I’m not sure I have the heart or the independence to really accept this. I wonder how anyone can. And perhaps no one does. Maybe we’re all in denial about this most of the time. Maybe that’s how we’re able to find people to love anyway, for as long as we’re allowed. Maybe that’s how we survive.



—Tammyland