By 1970, Dolly Parton was one of the most visible women in country music and, paradoxically, one of its most frustrated solo artists. Millions watched her every week beside Porter Wagoner on his syndicated television show, and her duets with Wagoner were reliable top-ten records. But a Dolly Parton record with only Dolly Parton’s name on it had never climbed higher than the lower reaches of the chart. What finally broke the spell was not a love ballad or a crossover bid. It was a three-minute story song about an orphan girl, a big black dog, and a feared mountain recluse named Joshua — a character Parton built out of the backwoods loners she had known as a child in Tennessee.
The Mountain Men Behind the Song
Parton has always mined her Appalachian childhood for material, and “Joshua” is one of the purest examples. In her 2020 book Songteller, she explained that the title character was no single person: “I based the character on two or three mountain men I knew as a kid, reclusive people who lived alone way back in the mountains. I just kind of built the story around them.” Growing up in a one-room cabin in the Great Smoky Mountains, one of twelve children, Parton knew the type well — solitary men who lived at the edge of the community and acquired dark reputations precisely because nobody knew anything about them.
That gap between reputation and reality became the engine of the song. Parton said she loved the story of “Joshua,” but she was just as fond of its construction: “I also love its little musical arrangement.” The record is built like the tale it tells — plainspoken, brisk, and warm — with Parton’s bright, fluttering soprano carrying a melody that skips along like a girl walking down a railroad track with nothing to lose.
An Orphan, a Big Black Dog, and a Happy Ending
The lyric unfolds like a miniature folk tale. The narrator, a girl raised in an orphan’s home, hears the local gossip about the man in the run-down shack down by the railroad track: folks say he is “a mean and a vicious man,” and warn her not to set foot on his land. Rather than believe them, she walks down to find out for herself. A big black dog growls at her in the yard. Then Joshua himself appears in the doorway — the biggest man she has ever seen, with long black hair and beard and a low, deep voice — and simply invites her in to pull up a chair.
What she discovers is not a monster but a mirror. Joshua lives alone not out of menace but out of habit and hurt, and the orphan girl recognizes the condition immediately: “I’d spent my life in an orphan’s home, and just like him I was all alone.” When he asks if she would stay, she says yes. The shack becomes “a happy home,” and the two of them fall in love. In an era when Parton’s story songs often ended in tragedy — abandoned women, dead lovers, ruined reputations — “Joshua” was striking for its tenderness. It is a song about loneliness recognizing itself across a doorway, and about the courage it takes to check whether the stories people tell are true.
One Voice the Duets Couldn’t Carry
The frustration behind the record was real. Wagoner had brought Parton onto The Porter Wagoner Show in 1967 and persuaded RCA Victor to sign her, and the partnership made her famous. Their duets — records like “The Last Thing on My Mind” — were hits, and the pair won the Country Music Association’s Vocal Group of the Year award in 1968. Parton’s solo singles, meanwhile, were continually ignored. She had been recording since she was a teenager, first for the small Goldband label and then for Mercury and Monument, and her early solo singles for RCA — “Dumb Blonde,” “Something Fishy,” “Just Because I’m a Woman” — were admired without ever breaking through; the defiant “Just Because I’m a Woman,” later recognized as a landmark of feminist country songwriting, stalled at number 17 in 1968.
The imbalance had a business edge as well as an artistic one. Wagoner was not only her duet partner and television host but her co-producer, and he held nearly half of Owe-Par, the publishing company Parton had founded with her uncle Bill Owens. He had a direct financial stake in her future, and by 1970 both of them had grown openly frustrated that the “girl singer” on the show could not buy a solo hit while her duets sailed into the top ten. Something about the formula — the material, the framing, the expectations — was keeping her voice from landing on its own.
The change began with a covers record in the summer of 1970, when Wagoner persuaded her to cut Jimmie Rodgers’ “Mule Skinner Blues” and watched it shoot to number three. For the follow-up, Parton reached into her own songbook. “Joshua” was recorded on October 21, 1970, at RCA Studio B in Nashville, with Bob Ferguson producing. Ferguson kept the arrangement lean and story-forward, leaving acres of room for Parton’s vocal — the record lives or dies on her storytelling, and she delivers it with a grin you can hear.
Number One, and a Grammy Nomination
RCA released “Joshua” as a single on November 9, 1970, backed with “I’m Doing This for Your Sake.” It debuted at number 57 on Billboard‘s Hot Country Songs chart in December and climbed steadily, reaching number one on the chart dated February 6, 1971 — its ninth week on the chart — and staying on the list for fifteen weeks. It also reached number two on the Canadian RPM country chart and number two on the Cash Box country chart, and even bubbled under the pop Hot 100 at number 108. For the first time, a record that belonged to Dolly Parton alone sat on top of the country chart.
The industry noticed. “Joshua” earned Parton a Grammy nomination for Best Country Vocal Performance, Female, at the 14th Annual Grammy Awards, where she lost to Lynn Anderson’s “Rose Garden.” Cash Box greeted the follow-up album by declaring that her “‘Joshua’ has to be one of the all-time best country records ever recorded,” while Billboard praised the album as an “exceptional followup” full of original songs. The album Joshua, released on April 12, 1971, peaked at number 16 on the Billboard Top Country Albums chart and number 198 on the Billboard 200, and its cover leaned into the song’s mythology, presenting Joshua as an imposing, shadowy figure in a doorway with Parton waiting at the threshold.
The album around the single showed how deep her writing bench already ran: originals like “The Last One to Touch Me,” “Walls of My Mind,” and “Daddy’s Moonshine Still” sat alongside the gospel ache of “Letter to Heaven.” Sessions for the record had stretched from October 1969 to February 1971 at RCA Studio B, with Parton stockpiling songs faster than the label could release them. Indeed, the two-month gap between Joshua and her previous album, The Golden Streets of Glory, remains the shortest between any two of her albums — a measure of how quickly the dam had broken once the hits began.
What “Joshua” Started
In hindsight, “Joshua” reads as the starting gun for one of the great runs in country music history. Within three years Parton would top the chart again with “Jolene” and “I Will Always Love You,” leave Wagoner’s show on her own terms, and begin the ascent that made her a singular American institution. She would eventually tie the record for the most number-one hits by a female country artist, with twenty-five. The first of them was this one — a happy-ending fable she wrote herself, drawn from the mountain loners of her childhood.
The song also fixed a template she would return to for the rest of her career: the vividly drawn character, the plain language carrying a quietly radical empathy, and a narrator who refuses to take the world’s word for who deserves to be loved. Joshua, the mean and vicious man of local legend, turned out to be a lonely sweetheart. Dolly Parton, the girl singer the charts kept ignoring, turned out to be a headliner. Both revelations arrived in the same three minutes.
The record has kept its place in her catalogue ever since. The Joshua album was reissued on CD in 2001, paired with Coat of Many Colors, and released as a digital download in 2015, introducing the title song to audiences who knew Parton first as a pop star, a film star, or a philanthropist. And when she came to write Songteller, her song-by-song memoir, “Joshua” earned its place near the front of the story — not merely as a hit, but as proof, delivered early and against the odds, that the characters she carried out of those mountains could carry her anywhere she wanted to go.