Songfacts®:

• While she was working on her bluegrass album Halos & Horns, something woke Dolly Parton in the wee hours of the morning. She didn't know what it was, but it ended up giving her the country-gospel tune "Raven Dove." She recalled in a track-by-track interview:
  
  "Something just pulled me out of bed. It was like a force, but not scary. It was like a little inner voice told me to get up because I had something to do. I went into the kitchen, sat down and thought, 'OK. Now what?' I got out a piece of paper and wrote the line, 'Raven of darkness, dove of peace.' Then I started writing words I didn't even realize were still stuck in my head from my religious background. And where did that melody come from? It's such an unusual thing. This whole song was strange for me. It was a very inspired song."
• Like the album title, Dolly offers up another contradictory image with this song. She explained in her 2020 book, Songteller: "We always think about the raven being the dark side and the dove being the white side. The song has those symbols kind of merging. It's like a battery that has to have a positive and a negative. One doesn't work without the other. You've gotta have the good and the bad in order to know what's right, and in order to know what's real and what ain't."
• Dolly's career got a boost when she released her first bluegrass album, The Grass Is Blue, at the suggestion of her producer Steve Buckingham. Because of its success, she released two more: Little Sparrow and Halos & Horns. To support the latter album, she embarked on a sold-out tour throughout the US and UK.