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Puppy love, puppy love, they all call it puppy love. I’m old enough now to kiss and hug, and I like it, it’s puppy love.
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Those are lyrics to Dolly Parton’s very first single, released when she was just 12 years old. Sixty-seven years later, on Tuesday, Parton died after a brief battle with cancer, sending rhinestone-studded waves of grief, song, and fond remembrance across the country.
Luckily for us in the Triangle, there are important pieces of Parton history housed in Chapel Hill.
A 1970s reissue of that first record, “Puppy Love,” is on view on the second floor of UNC-Chapel Hill’s Wilson Library. It’s part of the school’s Southern Folklife Collection. The B-side of the 45 rpm record features the song “Girl Left Alone.”
The school also has the original tape recording of that first single and the single’s first pressing. Those aren’t on public view, but can be requested at the library.
Members of the public with a photo ID can visit and use Wilson Library. The record will be on view until Oct. 2.
Parton recorded “Puppy Love” in 1959 at Goldband Records in Lake Charles, Louisiana, where her uncle Robert Henry was stationed in the Air Force. When he found a local recording studio, her uncle sent her money to travel there, and Parton knew immediately it was her “big chance.”
She begged her mother to let her go.
With no one else in her family able to take her to Louisiana, Parton relied on her grandmother, who “had never been anywhere.” Her grandmother was a nervous wreck, and the pair got lost in Birmingham, Alabama. Parton remembers her grandmother crying and dipping snuff in the bus station. People offered them potato chips because they had already eaten what little food they had brought for the journey.
When they finally arrived at the recording studio in Lake Charles, Parton serendipitously found a puppy love of her own. She fell in love with a Goldband executive’s son, a boy named Johnny.
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“He was the prettiest thing I had ever seen,” Parton wrote in her 2020 book, “Dolly Parton, Songteller: My Life in Lyrics.”
“We were about the same age, and that was my first big crush. My first love and my first record.”
“When ‘Puppy Love’ came out, it only got played locally,” she continued. “I remember the first time I heard myself on the radio. I about killed myself. I was sitting up on the counter, and the radio was on. I jumped off the counter and slid and fell trying to get to the radio to turn it up.”
Parton released a re-recording of “Puppy Love” in 2024. She called it “Puppy Love (Billy Version)” after Parton’s “god dog,” a French bulldog named Billy the Kid.
The master tape and the commercial releases of “Puppy Love” came to UNC-Chapel Hill as part of a collection of Goldband records in the 1990s.
The Southern Folklife Collection at UNC, which is dedicated to the music, art, and culture of the American South, has a “tremendous amount” of Parton-related objects, including old photographs, vinyl records, DVDs, VHS tapes, biographies, and sheet music, according to Steven Weiss, the collection’s curator.
“[The ‘Puppy Love’ recording] is a national treasure,” Weiss said. “And she was a national treasure.”
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This story was originally published August 26, 2026 at 5:38 PM.