Today, see how Peter Gabriel originally intended “Don’t Give Up” to be a duet between himself and Dolly Parton.
MUSIC URBAN LEGEND: Peter Gabriel originally intended “Don’t Give Up” to be a duet between himself and Dolly Parton.
While already a successful solo musician, when Peter Gabriel released his 1986 album, So, I don’t think anyone was quite expecting the album to be quite as HUGE as it was. All five singles off of the album became hits, from “Sledgehammer,” “In Your Eyes,” “Big Time,” Red Rain,” and, of course “Don’t Give Up.”
That last tune was done as a duet with the brilliant British singer, Kate Bush…
However, originally, Gabriel intended for the song to be done with Dolly Parton!
You see, Gabriel wrote the song after seeing a number of photos of Americans dealing with the Great Depression, and as he noted to Spin magazine years ago, about the song, “it’s not just a song about a woman supporting a man in a demanding relationship. The chief thing dragging them down is unemployment, which is presently tearing the social fabric of Thatcher’s England apart. The catalyst for ‘Don’t Give Up’ was a photograph I saw by Dorothea Lange, inscribed ‘In This Proud Land,’ which showed the dust-bowl conditions during the Great Depression in America. Without a climate of self-esteem, it’s impossible to function.”
And since the song was about something so American in its origins, Gabriel explained to John Doran in a 2011 interview that that was why he first tried to get Dolly Parton to do the duet:
Because there was this reference point of American roots music in it when I first wrote it, it was suggested that Dolly Parton sing on it. But Dolly turned it down… and I’m glad she did because what Kate did on it is… brilliant. It’s an odd song, a number of people have written to me and said they didn’t commit suicide because they had that song on repeat or whatever, and obviously you don’t think about things like that when you’re writing them. But obviously a lot of the power of the song came from the way that Kate sings it. Dolly later asked me to sing it with her on her TV show but I couldn’t because I was on tour.
Obviously, the final song was amazing, so it’s probably for the best, but what a fascinating duet that could have been!
The legend is…
STATUS: True
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I had no idea Dolly Parton was the original idea for Don’t Give Up before Kate Bush. Fun to imagine how the lyrics might have changed. Comparing demo and final lyrics is a hobby of mine, and a free diff checker makes the line changes easy to spot.