A memorable 1972 concert at the Lane County Fairgrounds gave Dolly Parton the first standing ovation of her career , and inspired her song “Eugene Oregon.”
When Dolly Parton played a concert in Eugene on Valentine’s Day 1972, she was at a key point in her groundbreaking career.
At the time, Parton , the beloved country singer, songwriter and entertainer who died Tuesday, Aug. 25, at age 80 , was five years into a seven-year stint as a featured performer on “The Porter Wagoner Show.” In fact, Wagoner was the headliner for the Eugene concert.
By 1972, though, according to news accounts, Parton’s popularity was rising and she was starting to rack up solo Top 10 country hits like “Joshua” and “Coat of Many Colors.” She eventually parted ways with Wagoner in 1974. (“I Will Always Love You” was written as a farewell to Wagoner.)
But she was still on the road with Wagoner and his Wagonmasters when they pulled into Eugene for a Feb. 14 show at the Agricultural Building at the Lane County Fairgrounds.
At the time, Parton had been ill for about four days , “bad sick,” as she put it in a 1980 interview with Portland’s KATU News , and had canceled her appearances at a handful of previous shows.
“Porter would go out and say that I was sick, and that bothered me, too, for people to think that I was in their town and couldn’t come out,” Parton said in the interview.
That night in Eugene, however, she mustered her strength to go onstage before a crowd of 1,500.
“I went out on stage, and I was so weak that when I came out, [Wagoner] had told them I was sick but I wanted to come out,” Parton told KATU News. “So, I got a standing ovation. And so, I started to sing ‘Coat of Many Colors’ and they stood up again, and I just started crying because I was so touched by it. It was like a friend from home or something.”
Her publicist told Eugene Register-Guard columnist Bob Welch in 2009 that Parton told the crowd that she was ill, “and asked them to please forgive my weakness.” The audience was more than willing to forgive, greeting “Coat of Many Colors” with a standing ovation , which Parton said was “the first time anyone stood up for me right in the middle of the show.”
After the concert, Parton was so moved by the audience response that she went back to the touring bus, and wrote the song “Eugene Oregon.” The first lines of the song: “Eugene, Oregon, I’ll remember you for the rest of my life; I won’t forget how good you were to me.”
In her 1980 interview, Parton loosely paraphrased one of the verses in the then-unreleased song, saying: “The only way I could thank you was to sit down and write you this song.”
Then, as she finished telling the anecdote, she joked to the interviewer: “Now I’m about to cry again!”
Attending the concert
Bryan Dawley, a 65-year-old Corvallis resident who moved to Oregon in 1968, was in the crowd that February night in 1972. He was then 10 years old, and his mother bought him tickets to the concert as a family Valentine’s Day gift.
His dad wasn’t “too thrilled by the whole thing,” he recalled. But Dawley was struck to see the people he watched on television every Sunday night perform in real life.
“They looked much like they did on [Wagoner’s] weekly TV program , not dressed like anything you’d see in Veneta or Eugene,” Dawley recalled in an email to Lookout Eugene-Springfield.
Dawley remembers seeing the famous standing ovation that reportedly inspired Parton to write her song about Eugene, but because it was his first concert, he didn’t realize he was witnessing something special.
After her ovation, Wagoner told the crowd that “Dolly had been crying when she came to the trailer,” Dawley said. “He asked what was wrong, had someone bothered her, and she said ‘No, the crowd had given her a standing ovation.’ I’m a bit blurrier here, but [I] think she’d said something to the effect that that had never happened before.”
The song she wrote after the concert remained unreleased until 2009’s “Dolly,” a four-CD box set that included “Eugene Oregon” along with six other unreleased tracks. It was reportedly one of Parton’s favorite songs, and nowadays, it can be heard playing on the loudspeakers at Autzen Stadium from time to time during Ducks games.
Parton’s philanthropy also touched Eugene. More than 27,000 children under the age of 5 in Lane County have been mailed free books through her early literacy program, Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library.
Since 2014, the program has sent almost 480,000 books in Eugene, more than 140,300 books in Springfield and over 138,200 books sent to early readers in rural Lane County communities. The program expanded to become countywide July 1. More details will be revealed in September.
“In her song ‘Eugene Oregon,’ she sang that she’d remember the kindness of our state for the rest of her life , just as we’ll remember the love and good deeds she put into the world,” U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley wrote in a Tuesday Facebook post commemorating Parton.
To honor Parton, flags across Oregon and the United States will be flown at half-mast until sunset Sept. 1, per proclamations from President Donald Trump and Gov. Tina Kotek.
In a statement, Kotek said: “Oregon is grateful for her extraordinary life, her leadership, and the joy she brought to so many.”
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