VMP Magazine

If Carl hadn’t asked, it wouldn’t have ever happened.Dolly Parton and her husband, Carl Dean, had been married — very happily — for a few months wh...

John Travolta in cowboy boots. Ralph Lauren designed-bolo ties. Hollywood fame. Country music was in a strange and unusual place in the early ’80s, thanks to the smash movie Urban Cowboy that found the genre suddenly smack in the middle of pop consciousness, and instant national adoration. It was on the runways and the red carpets, the radio and magazine covers. Country music, and country style, was everywhere — even Dolly Parton had crossed over with her Kenny Rogers duet “Islands in the Stream.” And, as is the Nashville way, not everyone was thrilled. Someone needed to come and shake the genre back to a connection with its traditional core. 

“Something that’s really important to women,” Loretta Lynn wrote in her 1976 memoir Coal Miner’s Daughter, “[men who run the radio stations] don’t want no part of, leastways not on the air.”