Songfacts®:

• Dolly Parton already established she's no "Dumb Blonde" on her previous single and she's still proving it on this tune, where she suspects her man is up to no good. When he stays out late on a so-called fishing trip, she realizes something fishy is going on.
• In her 2020 book, Songteller, Dolly explained how this song came together. "When I wrote 'Something Fishy,' I guess I was probably trying to think of something commercial that would at least be in keeping with the success I'd had with 'Dumb Blonde,'" she recalled. "I was trying to do something a little more uptempo, something that had a little bit of spunk. 'Dumb Blonde' was 'This dumb blonde ain't nobody's fool.' 'Something Fishy' was 'You think you're going to fool me? I'm too smart for that. You say you're going fishing. I think there's something fishy going on. You think you can fool me because I'm a girl, like I don't have enough sense to know what you're doing?"
• This is the third single from Dolly's debut album, Hello, I'm Dolly. While she already had success writing tunes for other artists (Bill Phillips had a Top 10 Country hit with her composition "Put It Off Until Tomorrow" the previous year), this was the first time she scored a hit with one of her own songs. It peaked at #17 on the Country chart.
• Around this time, TV audiences were becoming familiar with Dolly as the new singer on The Porter Wagoner Show. Dolly and Porter released a number of hit duet albums before Dolly's solo career took off.
• Dolly released her debut album through Monument Records, an independent label owned by Fred Foster, who also produced the album. Foster also snapped the cover photo, which features the 21-year-old singer standing beneath a tree and casting a knowing glance at the camera.