Big Wheels Keep on Turnin': Porter Wagoner's Career Rises Again

by PEP | August 17, 2007 at 07:01 pm | 462 views | add comment | 0 recommendations

Porter Wagoner, who helped launch Dolly Parton, has led a life worthy of well, a country song. The country music legend, about to turn 80, almost died last summer--but he's on the road again.

Porter Wagoner looks right at home in the marble lobby of Manhattan's Roosevelt Hotel. He wears a dark Western suit and tie and holds a shiny black cane. The glare from the crystal chandelier reflects off his eyeglasses as he tilts his head back, trying to remember the last time he played Madison Square Garden.

In the '60s and '70s, Porter Wagoner was known as one of country music's great showmen.

Sometime in the '70s ... one of those package tours ... Little Jimmie Dickens and Faron Young were there ... some others he can't recall ...

Back then, "The Thin Man from West Plains" was still the grand showman of country music with his rhinestone suits and pompadour hair. He had a TV show and dozens of hits on his own and with a pretty young blonde named Dolly Parton.

All that faded with time, and so did Wagoner. He checked into a psychiatric hospital for exhaustion, his show went off the air, he was dropped from his record label and dismissed as a relic. Last summer he nearly died.

Except for his standing gig on the Grand Ole Opry, he was mostly forgotten.

Until.