I would be being unfair to myself – and Dolly – if I failed to include her greatest song, yet I had somehow neglected it until now. So here it is.

My profile pic is taken with her (by Richard Wootton ) just outside the door of her private chapel, in her home in Nashville in 2006.

After doing an interview there, she was kind enough to allow me to look around on my own; I remember the walls were decorated with frescoes of women in wisps of clothing frolicking with each other.

Angels, perhaps, or seraphim or something. Definitely not Dolly and her girlfriends lezzing it up in the privacy of their own “chapel.” I don’t think it’s been consecrated: she told me she was not religious but was “a very spiritual person.”

Dolly, of course, was delightful, and at close quarters she looked exactly the same as she does in photos and on TV – like a tiny, flawless doll with a decolletage that could not so much sink battleships as keep the entire Spanish Armada afloat.

I was impressed by the way she managed to subtly distance her politics from those of her more conservative fans.

She managed to convey her less than enthusiastic view of George Bush Jr, then waging war with Iraq, by recounting how she had declined a visit to the White House to receive her Congressional Medal from him.

The date clashed with her brother’s opening of a new fried chicken franchise, she explained, adding: “Family always comes first.”

Most of all I was impressed by her reply when I admired her extravagantly decorated fingernails and inquired whether they were real.

She tossed her wig of blonde curls back and laughed: “They’re real acrylic.”
Anyway, what more needs to be said about this somg? Apart from the fact that she wrote Jolene and I Will Always Love You – two of the most popular songs of all time – ON THE SAME DAY.

First released in 1973, it was number one in America the following year but didn’t make the UK charts until 1976. At the time I probably thought it was rubbish. I was young and I was an idiot.