Porter Wagoner's WSM studio — where Dolly got her break

In 1967, Dolly Parton joined The Porter Wagoner Show — a syndicated television and radio programme that aired across more than one hundred markets and gave her a national audience before she had a national record. Wagoner was one of the most successful country performers of the era, a rhinestone-suited showman from the Missouri Ozarks with a weekly TV show, a devoted following, and a longstanding need for a female vocal counterpart. He found her in Dolly Parton, who had arrived in Nashville from the Smoky Mountains of East Tennessee at the age of eighteen with two suitcases and a fixed intention.

The pairing lasted seven years and produced a series of successful duet albums on RCA Victor, including "The Last Thing on My Mind" and "We'll Get Ahead Someday." More significantly, the show gave Parton a platform from which to develop her songwriting and her stage persona at scale, and the RCA connection led directly to her solo recording career. The relationship was also a source of tension: Wagoner initially resisted her departure when she decided to pursue a solo career, and the 1974 song she wrote as a farewell — "I Will Always Love You" — became one of the most successful country singles of its era, later covered by Whitney Houston in a version that became one of the bestselling singles in history.

The specific WSM studio buildings associated with the Wagoner Show years are no longer operational in their original form. The Music Row area of Nashville, where most of this activity centred, has been substantially redeveloped.