(Credit: RCA Records / Linda Ronstadt)
When you think of your dream collaboration, what are you basing it on? Are you imagining that their voices or instrumental abilities would work well together, or considering that their different musical backgrounds could combine to create something unique and exciting? Many people might wonder if, say, Dolly Parton and Linda Ronstadt would make a harmonious pairing, and there’s plenty of good reason to think they’d bounce off each other.
Well, they did – twice. Alongside Emmylou Harris, Parton and Ronstadt produced two albums, Trio and Trio II, and people’s conception of them being able to work well together was proven to be correct. Their lead and harmony vocals combine to make a resplendent folk-country marvel, and the gifts that these three musicians had for picking out sumptuous melodies were on full display over both of their collaborative records.
The two Trio records were well received and not seen as a shameless cash grab like many collaborative records can be. All three artists were on top form as they brought out a combination of original songs and covers. However, the distance between the two releases was 12 years, and surely there must have been a good reason for the gap other than conflicting schedules. If the first was met with a good reception, there surely would have been demands for a second to come soon after.
Perhaps there could have been a neat trio of Trio albums had they chosen to come together one last time, but unfortunately, this never materialised. Part of the reason for it was scheduling conflicts, but a larger part of it failing to see the light of day was the frictions between Ronstadt and Parton, who unfortunately realised that despite their incredible musical connection, they were not made for each other in terms of their work ethic.
Trio II was five years in the making, and a large amount of that was due to Parton being absent a lot of the time; something that irked the ever-punctual Ronstadt. Stating that the Queen of Country was a nightmare to ever make contact with, she declared that she’d never work with her again after the release of their second album together. What Harris would have made of all of this, I’m not sure, but being caught in the crossfire of this petulant disagreement must have made her feel incredibly awkward.
In Dolly: The Biography, Ronstadt is quoted as having said: “She gave her word. Her exact words at the time were, ‘I get so many irons in the fire, sometimes I burn my own ass.’”
Parton’s flakiness and last-minute cancellations for the most trivial reasons were what frustrated Ronstadt the most, with her saying that Parton would regularly wait until the night before a recording session to say that she had something come up. “I showed up, Emmy showed up, and the night before we started, Dolly sent us a fax, saying there was something wrong with her infomercial and she had to go back for 10 days,” Ronstadt claimed, frustrated by the ordeal.
“I can’t work with her,” she came to realise. “She didn’t represent herself as being reliable.” But what of Parton’s thoughts on the situation? She believed it was all down to a different external factor that emotions were high. “I realized we’re now just a bunch of old crotchety, cranky women, set in our ways and getting up there ‘round fifty, goin’ through change-of-life mood swings,” she claimed. “You never know a true feeling from a hot flash. I thought, ‘I don’t need this. I ain’t that old.’”
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