Coat of Many Colors

She wrote it in 1969 on Porter Wagoner's tour bus, on the back of a dry-cleaning receipt from one of his suits, because there was no paper. Wagoner framed the receipt, and it now hangs in the Chasing Rainbows Museum at Dollywood. The song tells how her mother, Avie Lee, sewed her a coat from a box of rags while telling her the Bible story of Joseph's coat, and how the children at school laughed at it. Parton said the memory had hurt more than she knew until she wrote it down, and that the song teaches about bullying, love, acceptance and good parents.

She recorded it in Nashville on 27 April 1971 with Bob Ferguson producing. Nadine Hubbs, writing for the Library of Congress, notes three verses before the first chorus, an organ that enters on the third, the Nashville Edition's harmonies on the chorus and a key change for the schoolyard scene, and reads the song as Parton showing Appalachian poverty on her own terms. Released as a single in September 1971, it reached number four on the country chart. It entered the National Recording Registry in 2011, and NBC made a television film of it in 2015.

Live

It became the song she played most: setlist.fm logs 193 performances, the last in 2023. She sang it at her Austin City Limits debut in 2001 and at Glastonbury in 2014. After her mother died in 2003 she could not sing it without crying for months. The upload in the hypersongs web is an early television performance of the song, posted by a fan channel.