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The country music legend Dolly Parton couldn’t have faced more pressure than when she and scooted off to Los Angeles for a new management and a shot at pop music. Her detractors resented her and they predicted that Hollywood’s wolves would everything apart that she had built. However, Parton insisted,

“I’m not leaving country, I’m just taking it with me.”

Well, she first took it to “The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.” That’s the show in which Carson famously stated that he would give a week’s pay to “look under there” (meaning her blouse). Later that year she introduced them to her music with a different-sounding “Here You Come Again.”

Dolly Parton’s new producer in Los Angeles, Gary Klein, first heard the song on a B. J. Thomas album and gave Thomas a call. Thomas said he had no intention of releasing it as a single but Klein persuaded Dolly to cut it.

Klein produced a final mix, however, Dolly became edgy. She feared that the song would confirm Nashville’s suspicions that she had “gone Hollywood.” It was because of her misgivings about the record containing nary a smack of “real country” in it, so she begged the producer to add a steel guitar to the track. Klein accommodated her and called in steel player Al Perkins to provide the needed parts, just enough to assuage any doubters. Klein remembers,

“Dolly wanted people to be able to hear the steel guitar, so if someone said it isn’t country, she could say it is and prove it. She was so relieved. It was like her life sentence had been commuted.”

“Here You Come Again” did everything Parton wanted. It spent five weeks at the top of Billboard’s country chart and brought her to No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 pop chart. Two days after Christmas, 1977, the song helped Dolly secure her first gold album, which quickly went platinum as well. “Here You Come Again” became her first gold single and was the biggest of her 24 number one records. The disc netted a Grammy award and the California-based Academy of Country Music named Parton “Entertainer of the Year.” In October of 1978, even the Nashville-based Country Music Association recognized that Dolly had not abandoned the city and also voted her as the Entertainer of the Year as well.