Songfacts®:

• In the title track to her 29th solo album, Dolly Parton tells the story of a country girl named Daisy Mae who has big dreams of going to Hollywood and cruising around in a white limousine. Dolly went the Hollywood route herself in the early '80s, starring in hit films like 9 to 5 and The Best Little Whorehouse In Texas but, like Daisy Mae, she's the "same old down-home girl" at heart.
• This was the album's fifth single. It peaked at #29 on the Country chart.
• Dolly wrote this with Mac Davis, a country singer who wrote hits like "A Little Less Conversation" and "In The Ghetto" for Elvis Presley. He also had some success as a crossover artist in the '70s, starting with "Baby Don't Get Hooked on Me," and as the host of his own variety show.
• Excited about working with her fellow songwriting veteran, Dolly proclaimed they were "gonna write like we're hungry again." She realized the absurdity of her statement when she pulled up to his Beverly Hills mansion in her studio-paid limousine - as far from hungry as a person could get.
  
  "When I got out of the car, I said to Mac, 'I feel like such an idiot telling you we were gonna write like we were hungry. We have got to write something about a white limousine!'" she recalled in her 2020 book, Songteller. "He said, 'Well, let's just do it.' He got out his guitar and started picking. It turned out that we were very complementary as songwriters. We were matching each other line for line. We were impressed with each other. That was the first song we ever wrote together."
• After the failure of her country-pop album Rainbow, Dolly wanted to return to her country roots and tapped Ricky Skaggs to be her producer on White Limozeen. Skaggs was carving out a successful career for himself as a country singer, but he didn't have much experience as a producer outside of his own material. Dolly's record label and management team were dubious about her choice, but she remained firm in her decision, certain that she'd found a kindred spirit in Skaggs.
  
  "I felt very strongly about Ricky Skaggs producing this record, because I feel that Ricky is more like me musically than anybody else I know," she wrote in Songteller. "He understood the 'old Dolly,' as far as the pure mountain music and what country music really is. What I wanted to do was an album that was really authentic sounding."
• Obviously the songwriters took some creative license with the word "limousine." Dolly wasn't sure how to spell it, so Davis told her to just write it out the way it sounds, and "limozeen" was born. "Then we both got to thinking that that way of spelling it was clever, that it would draw attention to the song," Dolly told The Orlando Sentinel in 1989. "Finally I thought, 'What a great title for an album.'"
• 1989 also brought another Hollywood project from Dolly Parton: She starred in the movie Steel Magnolias alongside Sally Field and Julia Roberts. Unlike her other film roles, this one didn't feature any of her music.