1975 · Behind the Songs
Some radio stations refused to play it. Listeners bought it anyway.
Released on January 13, 1975, “The Bargain Store” was the first single and the title track of Dolly Parton’s album of the same name. She wrote it herself, Bob Ferguson produced the session for RCA Victor, and “I’ll Never Forget” served as the B-side.
The conceit is pure Dolly: a woman who has been loved and left compares herself to secondhand merchandise in a discount shop — worn and marked down, yet still worth something to the right buyer. It is a tender, self-effacing image, and it is easy to hear why she believed in it.
Some country radio programmers heard something else. A line in the lyric was read as a veiled reference to prostitution, and a number of stations pulled the record from their playlists — enough of a stir that the song is still filed among obscenity controversies in music.
The ban backfired. Listeners heard a song about heartbreak rather than scandal, and “The Bargain Store” climbed to No. 1 on the country chart — Parton’s fifth solo chart-topper — while reaching No. 35 on the Adult Contemporary survey and No. 3 in Canada.
On the record, the arrangement stays out of her way: the melody does the persuading, and Parton sings the metaphor straight, without a wink — which may be exactly why the misunderstanding stung.
A song banned over a misreading became one of the defining No. 1s of her mid-seventies run — proof that her audience trusted her intentions more than the censors did.