“To Know Him Is to Love Him” turns a simple sentence into a hush of devotion—love remembered so tenderly it feels like a prayer whispered into the groove.
When Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt, and Emmylou Harris joined voices as Trio, they didn’t just revive an old pop standard—they proved that three distinct legends could breathe as one. Their recording of “To Know Him Is to Love Him” arrived with the quiet confidence of something already timeless: it debuted at No. 49 on Billboard’s Hot Country Singles chart (as a “Hot Shot Debut”) in the issue dated February 21, 1987, then kept climbing until it reached No. 1 on the chart dated May 16, 1987. That arc—from an attentive first landing to a patient rise—fits the song’s spirit. It doesn’t demand the room. It wins the room.
Part of what makes this performance so affecting is how it treats stillness as a strength. Trio (the album) was released in 1987, and Rhino’s retrospective notes the campaign truly began in January with this very single—an intentional choice, because the track functions like a mission statement: harmony first, ego last. There’s no grandstanding here, no vocal acrobatics for applause. Instead, there’s that rare kind of musical trust—three singers leaning into the same emotion, letting the lyric do its modest work.
And what a lyric it is, with one of popular music’s most haunting origin stories. Phil Spector wrote “To Know Him Is to Love Him” in the late 1950s after being struck by the words on his father’s gravestone—“To Know Him Was to Love Him.” The first recording, by The Teddy Bears (Spector’s own group), was released in 1958 and went on to spend three weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. In other hands, that backstory might invite melodrama. But what’s startling is how plainly the song carries its grief: one line, one vow, one soft insistence that love can be summed up without being diminished.
That’s precisely why Dolly, Linda, and Emmylou were such ideal interpreters. Each of them had made a career out of finding the human pulse inside a lyric—Parton’s luminous plainspoken empathy, Ronstadt’s silvery ache, Harris’s weathered grace. When they meet on this track, the blend feels almost architectural: Ronstadt often seems to float the top light, Harris brings that steady, dusky center, and Parton glows around the edges like warmth from a lamp in a quiet room. The result is not a “cover” so much as a reframing—pop turned to country not by twang or tempo, but by intimacy.
Even the cultural moment around the recording has a cinematic tenderness. The music video for Trio’s version was directed by George Lucas, and it circulated widely on country television outlets at the time—an odd-sounding footnote until you remember how the 1980s loved unlikely intersections, and how this project itself was an intersection: Nashville tradition, West Coast refinement, and folk-country storytelling sharing one microphone.
Yet the deeper meaning of “To Know Him Is to Love Him” isn’t really about who “him” is at all. It’s about the way memory edits a life down to its essence. The line works like an epitaph because it is an epitaph—love distilled into something you could carve into stone. In Trio’s hands, that idea expands: sometimes we don’t need the full story, only the certainty of the feeling. Sometimes devotion doesn’t shout. It simply remains—steady as breath, faithful as harmony.
And maybe that’s why this record still lands the way it does. The chart facts are impressive—No. 1 country hit, a carefully paced climb from that No. 49 “Hot Shot Debut.” But the true achievement is quieter: three voices reminding us that the most enduring songs often carry their power in a whisper, not a roar.