“Making Plans” was written by Johnny Russell and Voni Morrison and first recorded by the Wilburn Brothers in 1964. Its next significant life came in 1980, when Porter Wagoner and Dolly Parton recorded it as a duet and took it to #2 on the Billboard country chart — a return to a song from a partnership that had defined both artists’ careers in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The song’s subject — two people making plans for a shared future — fit naturally into the harmonized, romantic mode of the great Nashville duet tradition.
When Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt, and Emmylou Harris finally assembled to record together — a collaboration that had been attempted since the late 1970s before label agreements and scheduling allowed it to happen — “Making Plans” was the second track on the resulting album, Trio (Warner Bros., March 2, 1987). The three-part harmony treatment transformed the song from a duet showcase into something more open and sustained: three voices with complementary textures, Ronstadt’s clear soprano against Harris’s darker grain and Parton’s high country lead.
A notable version is the Trio recording. Trio won the Grammy for Best Country Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal in 1988 and remains a landmark of the acoustic-country crossover that ran parallel to the bluegrass revival in the 1980s — female singers from the folk and country traditions finding common ground in close-harmony performance that the bluegrass community had been practicing since the beginning.
