Songfacts®:

• The first single from Dolly Parton's Better Day album is a modern remake of her 1974 duet with Porter Wagoner, which was featured on their collaboration album Porter 'n' Dolly. Dolly premiered the updated version on The Ellen DeGeneres Show on May 27, 2011.
• Dolly told Taste Of Country that her love of romance was the inspiration behind the track. She said: "Well, 'Together You and I' is one of my favorite love songs that I've written, and I've always been a sucker for romance. We all kind of have that fantasy that once you fall in love it's gonna be forever. I think people still dream of that even when love goes bad. Actually, it's a song I wrote many, many years ago, and when I actually started to put this album together - of very positive, uplifting songs, not just about life but and the world in general, but about love - I wanted to have some real positive, uplifting things. So 'Together You and I' just kind of popped up and it just seemed to be the perfect one. We kind of brought it up-to-date with the arrangement and the production ... and it made it sound very mainstream, and everybody seemed to love it the most out of all the ones we had on the CD. So that's the one that actually popped its pretty little head up and made the first single!"
• Trey Fanjoy directed the music video for the updated version of the song, which features an array of folks grasping hands to make a human chain. According to Dolly, Fanjoy branched out beyond the idea of romantic love and made the clip about universal love, "of like love between just mankind just trying to get along together in this world - in addition to that male-female, or boy-girl, boy-boy, girl-girl, whatever kind of love that we find in this world."
• Better Day was Dolly's second album, following Backwoods Barbie, to be released through her own Dolly Records. The country music veteran was tired of chasing after major labels who showed no interest in her because of her age, so she started her own company to exclusively release her own music.