Dolly Parton #51: Run, Rose, Run (2022)

Not content to simply have conquered the worlds of music, film, philanthropy, and theme park attractions, Dolly Parton set her sights on the literary world in 2022, teaming with mega-bestselling author James Patterson to write Run, Rose, Run, the story of a young woman fleeing her dark past with dreams of country music success. After so many years of putting books in the hands of needy children, writing one of her own probably seemed like a logical next step, even if the resulting book doesn’t sound all that kid-friendly. To go along with her first foray as a novelist, Dolly also turned out something more in her wheelhouse: a companion album. Thus, Run, Rose, Run is a multimedia project of sorts, with a film adaptation apparently in the works.

I’ve not read the book, but it’s not hard to glean a rough narrative from the album alone. After the opening song “Run” serving as a sort of prologue, the titular character sets out for Nashville on “Big Dreams and Faded Jeans,” tries to avoid the pitfalls of opportunists and conmen on “Snakes in the Grass,” finds love and recovers from heartbreak on “Demons,” “Lost and Found” and “Dark Night, Bright Future.” There’s also some more general character kind of songs like “Driven” (about being, well, driven) or “Firecracker” (about being feisty and not some passive flower), and a few songs that don’t really fit into the story but are maybe meant to be songs written or performed by Rose? Having not read the book, I can’t be totally sure, but even without the narrative, it works as a pretty straightforward Dolly album, with plenty of her favorite themes and styles.

Musically, Run, Rose, Run matches its Nashville setting with an array of classic country sounds, from swaggering honky-tonk on “Woman Up (and Take it Like a Man)” to stomping acoustic blues on “Snakes in the Grass” to several full-steam-ahead bluegrass barnstormers like “Firecracker” or “Dark Night, Bright Future.” It’s an approach that mostly looks backwards, which is a good thing, because its story feels archetypal in a lot of ways. Setting these in a more radio-country kind of milieu wouldn’t work nearly as well.

It’s on the ballads that the album sometimes stumbles, with a couple tracks feeling like they stepped straight out of the early 90s moment when country and so-called “adult contemporary” started to fuse together, something Dolly herself is no doubt well acquainted with. “Secrets” has a very 90s sheen, with some chiming synths and a sort of quasi-R&B slow burn rhythm. The final track “Love or Lust,” a duet with Dolly’s longtime collaborator Richard Dennison, has a sort of musical theatre feel that can’t help but come off as corny. “Demons” does a little better, with a more dreamy, country sound and a vocal assist from Ben Haggard, Merle’s youngest son, along with a more complex lyric about two people struggling to see through their own problems to be able to help each other.

Despite these slight missteps, Run, Rose, Run is a pretty solid Dolly Parton album, probably her most satisfying since Blue Smoke nearly a decade prior. It’s cozily in Dolly’s wheelhouse, trafficking in the kind of stuff that she could probably do in her sleep at this point, but it contains a few moments of brilliance that rank among her best songs in years. Easily the highlight comes at the album’s midpoint on “Blue Bonnet Breeze,” an outlier and a sort of “story within a story” in the narrative.

As gently twinkling chimes give way to droning fiddle and waltz-time acoustic guitar strums, Dolly spins a tragic yarn in a sweet, beguiling melody about two young lovers from different economic backgrounds who run off together, only to end up dead for their trouble. It feels like a song that could’ve been written hundreds of years ago, despite its more modern trappings, and easily the kind of song Dolly herself probably could have written during her much sadder early 70s period. The star-crossed lovers story is as ancient as stories themselves, and while Dolly doesn’t exactly find a new spin on it, the song is so enchanting that it hardly matters. It fades out with wordless vocals from Dolly before leaving us with those twinkling chimes, gently swaying in the titular breeze.

“Blue Bonnet Breeze” is a standout track, but the rest of the album delivers the Dolly goods too. After a couple excursions into children’s music and Christmas music, it’s nice to get another collection of Dolly doing what she does best, and making it look so darn effortless. No need to worry if you haven’t read the book; you’ll still be able to follow along.

Dolly Parton #50: A Holly Dolly Christmas (2020)

If you’ve read this blog for any length of time (and judging by my readership numbers, that’s a big if), you may know that typically my timing of listening to Christmas albums isn’t great. More than once, I’ve heard sleigh bells jingalin’ in the dead of summer, or in early January after my holiday cheer has already been spent. Though maybe Dolly Parton has some extra Christmas magic, because looking back, I managed to listen to her Kenny Rogers collab Once Upon a Christmas in early December. That also means I’ve been working on this Dolly project for well over a year, which is kinda nuts.

Anyway, during one of the worst Christmas seasons in modern memory, Dolly graced us with her third yuletide collection, 2020’s A Holly Dolly Christmas. How it took over 50 years for her to get around to using that title is beyond me.

Christmas 2020 just might have been the strangest Christmas in my lifetime, and I’m sure I’m not the only one. It was the first time in my life that I had to spend Christmas apart from my family, my partner and I opting to stay put in Chicago rather than travel to our loved ones during the most deadly time of the pandemic. While we still made it special in our own way, it was a more somber, scared, subdued kind of holiday, and one I hope I don’t have to repeat any time soon. Dolly had been working on this album well before the pandemic hit, but the timing of its release couldn’t have been better.

For her third Christmas outing, Dolly turns in a mix of holiday classics as well as a healthy number of originals, calling in some of her famous friends and family to help her out. Unsurprisingly, the album works best when she keeps it simple, sticking to the classic sounds that send that instant serotonin boost into your brain. Album opener “Holly Jolly Christmas” (why they didn’t swap Jolly for Dolly that time, I don’t know) sets the tone nicely, with some western swing-inspired strings and a crisp, Bakersfield sound kind of vibe. “Cuddle Up, Cozy Down Christmas,” a duet with Michael Bublé, has the kind of jazzy standard feel of a “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” only without the icky subtext. Dolly and Bublé play off each other nicely with a welcome dose of cheese that lets us know they’re not taking any of this too seriously. “Christmas on the Square” goes in a more bluegrass direction, and her take on “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” splits the difference between country and jazz.

Sometimes, though, Dolly does take things very seriously indeed, with a few more somber ballads to balance out all the sugar. There’s “Christmas Is,” a duet with her goddaughter Miley Cyrus (whose voice sounds like it was recorded via Zoom, which it may very well have been), a slow-burn song that reminds us to check our privilege, that Christmas for some can be another crushing reminder of inequality. It’s an important message, a necessary antidote to the Capitalist underpinnings and conspicuous consumption of the season. Elsewhere, Dolly gives us a reminder of the holiday’s overtly Christian origins with “Circle of Love,” a paean to Jesus’ love that starts with a dreamlike guitar pattern and builds to a stirring devotional. Her take on Willie Nelson’s weeper “Pretty Paper,” with Nelson himself joining for a duet, is lovely and moving, which doesn’t take much when it comes to that song.

As is often the case with Dolly’s albums, while there are plenty of highs, not all of it works. The less said about “Christmas Where We Are,” an overwrought slab of jangly-guitared country pop with a strained-sounding Billy Ray Cyrus, the better. Same goes for her take on Mariah Carey’s modern staple “All I Want for Christmas is You,” where she’s joined by a smirkily ad-libbing Jimmy Fallon doing his Jimmy Fallon thing all over it. Not a fan. It’s moving to hear her duet with her late brother Randy on “You Are My Christmas,” but the song itself is a pretty underwhelming piece of pop-country radio fodder, with that same kind of overly jangly acoustic guitar that makes it feel instantly dated.

Luckily, Dolly ends the album on a strong note with her take on “Mary, Did You Know?” a Christian pop track that’s become a holiday staple on the more religious end of the spectrum. Dolly doesn’t mess with it too much, mostly sticking with guitar and strings under her awestruck vocals.

So will A Holly Dolly Christmas become a future holiday staple? Probably not, but it’s an above average collection all the same, and a welcome dose of warmth from a time in our recent past where that was in dramatically short supply.

Dolly Parton #49: I Believe In You (2017)

With her larger than life image and a persona radiating decency and joy, it’s a wonder it took Dolly Parton 50 years to make a children’s album. But lo and behold, a half century after her debut, Dolly released I Believe In You, her first and to date only record for children. Though it’s entirely likely that kids had been enjoying her music for quite a long time before she got around to making an album just for them.

I Believe In You was made with a very noble goal in mind: all proceeds go directly to Dolly’s Imagination Library charity, which has been sending free books to needy kids for decades now, fostering a love of reading from a very young age. To date, they’ve sent out over 200 million books, and show no signs of slowing down. So I, as a grown man in my 30s, can feel a bit less weird about listening to an album expressly made for children by knowing my tiny fraction of a cent of streaming residuals is going to help fund a very worthy cause.

And make no mistake, I Believe In You is not one of those children’s albums that an adult could throw on for their own enjoyment, at least not without raising a few eyebrows from anyone within earshot. No, this thing is for kiddos in nearly every way, from its short song lengths to its toy-keyboard production to Dolly’s emphatic vocals delivered as if there were a gaggle of toddlers running around the recording studio (knowing her, I wouldn’t be all that surprised if there were).

To Dolly’s credit, all of the songs here are original, and most of them are new to this collection. She could’ve easily cranked out a country version of “The Wheels on the Bus” or something and called it a day, but she actually wrote a whole new album instead. And the songs really aren’t half bad as far as kids music goes; they’ve got good lessons for kids to learn, from loving themselves (“I Am a Rainbow”) to the power of imagination (“Imagination”) to not being a little asshole (“Makin’ Fun Ain’t Funny”). It’s all pretty straightforward, but we’re not usually looking for complexity in these kinds of songs. The band does have fun adding in a bit of rhythmic complexity though, with several songs that shift from straight-ahead 4/4 country rhythms into syncopated R&B and even a Latin rhythm at one point.

Dolly does give us a couple re-dos, including a new version of her classic “Coat of Many Colors,” which is a great song for kids already, and she doesn’t mess with it too much here. There’s also a new version of “Brave Little Soldier,” one of the most annoying cuts on For God and Country, which sadly is not any less annoying here. One original song that stuck out to me in a good way is “Chemo Hero,” which benefits from a more specific point of view. Dolly inhabits the character of a young cancer survivor, bravely going through treatment to fight the “bad cells” that are making them sick. It’s gotta be hard to write a song about a kid with cancer that manages to be uplifting, but I can imagine it would be incredibly important to anyone going through that kind of fight. It’s the sort of thing Dolly’s so good at, looking at something others might not think about.

Sadly, while Dolly’s in fine form as usual, the album is somewhat let down by its production, courtesy of Dolly’s longtime collaborator Richard Dennison along with Toms McBryde and Rutledge. Most of the instrumentation feels very canned and a bit chintzy, particularly the synth horns which are all over the album. It may have been an aesthetic choice, but personally I don’t understand why kids music has to sound like it was recorded using cheap synthetic instruments. It’s true a lot of kids albums are shat out for a quick buck, but you’d think if Dolly was going to put in the effort to write a bunch of brand-new songs, her producers would back her up with a more organic sound.

All that said, it’s hard to find fault in an album whose main goal is putting more books in the hands of kids. Even if it’s not one I plan to listen to again any time soon, only the most shriveled-hearts among us could possibly find anything to complain about here. If you’ve got young kids, you could do a whole lot worse for them than playing this album. So next time you want to occupy them for a half hour or so, skip another replay of Cocomelon and put on some Dolly Parton instead. Though I’ve got a few other albums you might wanna play before this one.

Dolly Parton #48: Pure & Simple (2016)

Ah 2016. A year that kicked off with the death of David Bowie, met in the middle with the death of Prince, and ended with the election of America’s first real estate mogul turned wannabe dictator, it was a year that felt like a turning point in more ways than one. A real fuck of a year, in other words. So perhaps it was the best time for America’s greatest ray of sunshine, Dolly Parton, to attempt to soothe our collective souls with a new album.

Pure & Simple was released in August, but the ugliness of that particular election season was already in full swing, and bound to get uglier. I’m not trying to say that the two are related–Dolly has always tried to be pointedly apolitical–but it’s possible she took one look at the divisions tearing America (and her fan base) in two and decided to try to lighten our spirits. It seemed like that was a pretty smart idea, as Pure & Simple became Dolly’s first #1 country album in 25 years, since Eagle When She Flies all the way back in 1991.

The genesis for the album came about when Dolly played a couple of more stripped-down, intimate shows at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium (often considered the high church of country music) in 2015. The shows were a success, and Dolly enjoyed the more minimalist style enough to make an album in a similar vein. It says a lot about Dolly’s status that a show at a 2,300-capacity venue qualifies as “intimate.”

Pure & Simple does feel a bit more back-to-basics than some of Dolly’s more recent records, but it’s not exactly a stripped down affair like Hungry Again back in ’96. Its songs feature a lot of acoustic instruments and a fairly small backing band, but they’re still polished to a blinding sheen and have plenty of studio touches like backing vocalists and the occasional synth strings. Even when she’s trying to go small, Dolly really can’t help but go big.

The songs on Pure & Simple stay in a pretty lighthearted mode, detailing the joys of love both brand-new and lived-in. The first three tracks, “Pure and Simple,” “Say Forever You’ll Be Mine” and “Never Not Love You,” all explore similar territory, that of a love that’s matured but hasn’t lost any of its depth. By contrast, “Outside Your Door,” “I’m Sixteen,” and “Head Over High Heels” all riff on a newer kind of love, one that still has that youthful fire and makes us feel like kids again no matter how old we are. It can’t help but make the album feel a bit repetitive, with songs mining similar territory and not really interested in going any deeper than surface-level.

Unsurprisingly, the song that introduces a little bit of ambiguity to the album actually dates back to the 80s: “Can’t Be That Wrong” is a slightly altered version of a song called “God Won’t Get You” that appeared on the Rhinestone soundtrack back in ’84. It’s a type of song that might have been pretty controversial back in the day; rather than a cheater’s lament, its narrator grapples with her faith in God, knowing that cheating is wrong, but feeling so right about it that she doesn’t really care. It’s an unusual stance to hear from a long-married, deeply devout artist like Dolly, but she’s been inhabiting characters that have nothing to do with her personal life for her whole career. The song manages to inject a much needed dose of complexity into what is otherwise a pretty one-or-two-note album.

Dolly’s never been shy about bold-faced sentimentality, and often her cornball nature is a part of her charm, but some of the tracks on here are just downright cheesy. The worst offender would have to be “Kiss It (and Make It All Better),” which squanders a potentially suggestive title to relate a lover’s feelings to how the narrator’s mommy used to kiss her boo-boos when she was little. It’s a bit of a questionable link to begin with, and the song itself just makes it more so.

The cheesiness works better on a song like “I’m Sixteen,” which uses a jaunty finger-snapping rhythm for its tale of young love making Dolly’s character feel like a kid again. I can’t tell if it’s intentional, but backing singer Jeff Pearles’ deep bass responses of “oh yeah” like a pilled-out Kool Aid man is winningly silly in a way that works in spite of itself. Dolly matches it with a knowingly winking, randy vocal.

She manages to bring it back down to close the album with one of its finest tracks. Starting with Dolly’s reverent vocals backed with a string quartet, “Forever Love” boasts a gorgeous melody and the kind of small-scale feel that matches the album’s supposed impetus. Lyrically it’s pretty in line with the rest, but Dolly sings it with a kind of contained majesty, as if the full force of her feeling would sweep us all away. It’s a stunning track and a nice note on which to end the collection.

Pure & Simple isn’t really an all-time Dolly classic, but it certainly has its moments, and Dolly’s voice and charisma prove once again that she doesn’t need a whole lot of studio trickery to be compelling. Its smaller scope and shortened length (only 33 minutes) make it feel like a kind of minor miracle in the age of bloated running times.

Dolly Parton #47: Blue Smoke (2014)

At this point in her career, it seems that Dolly Parton is much more content to take her time between albums, waiting until she’s got a solid batch of songs or something to say, rather than trying to keep up with the feverish pace of the pop world. Of course, there’s also her being a business mogul, occasional actor, and all around pop culture icon to keep her busy; at this point, music is just one of the many aspects of the Dolly mythos.

Released three years after Better Day, 2014’s Blue Smoke is another solid, confident batch of songs, one that finds Dolly less concerned about courting country radio than she seemed to be on her last album. Turns out, she didn’t need to worry about trying to stay current, as this album did quite a bit better than the last, making it to #2 on the country album charts and #6 on the Billboard 200, bolstered by TV promotions and a word tour. It earned strong reviews, currently sitting with a solid 81/100 on Metacritic (if you care about that sort of thing). I found it to be a more enjoyable collection overall, not that Better Day didn’t have plenty of strong moments.

It kicks off with the title track, a dobro and chugging country shuffle underpinning its themes of heading out on the titular train, leaving a bad situation behind. The song changes styles a couple of times, transforming into a bluegrass hootenanny and a gospel clap-along before turning back into its original form. It’s probably the most musically adventurous track, with most songs content to stay in a straightforward country lane, with dips into bluegrass, gospel, and Appalachian folk.

One of the coolest tracks has to be the original “If I Had Wings,” a minor-key ballad with a melody that sounds much older than it is. It has a similar progression to “Jolene,” but doesn’t feel like a knockoff, with a sort of sultry, vaguely Latin flair to the rhythm. Later, Dolly proves she can still write a bracingly sad song with “Miss You-Miss Me,” a song that starts as a remembrance of her departed dad and the hope that he misses her from the beyond before turning into a heartbroken lament from a child towards their divorced parents, who can’t see their way through their own animosity to realize what their feuding has cost them. It doesn’t end with any real resolution, just a plea from a heartbroken person appealing to their parents’ love for them. Dolly hasn’t written a song that sad in quite some time.

Unlike Better Day, Blue Smoke isn’t an all-originals album, but its covers are well-chosen. There’s Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” here just called “Don’t Think Twice,” which Dolly transforms from a melancholy, slightly bitter ballad into a sprightly country track filled out with dobro and vocal harmonies, lending it a bit more hopeful edge than Dylan’s original. Later on, she gives us an updated version of the traditional murder ballad “The Banks of the Ohio,” playing both a convicted murderer and a writer who visits him in his jail cell. I love any time Dolly dips into these traditional tunes from her Appalachian upbringing, her voice is perfectly suited for them.

She adds another countrified take on a rock track to her growing repertoire alongside “Stairway to Heaven,” “Shine,” and “Time For Me To Fly,” this time transforming Bon Jovi’s horny power ballad “Lay Your Hands On Me” into an epic gospel-flavored devotional, changing the subject from a sexy lady into the Lord Himself. As usual, it works better than it has any right to, with big bombastic drums, dobro, fiddle, and handclaps. These sorts of covers could be gimmicky, but Dolly always makes them work through sheer conviction.

A couple of other country legends join Dolly for duets; first up is Kenny Rogers on “You Can’t Make Old Friends.” Over percussive guitar strums and pedal steel, Rogers and Dolly trade verses about the importance of long-time friendships, how the deep level of knowing someone can never be replaced. It’s a moving song in the wake of Rogers’s passing, hearing these two old pals share a song together. I’m sure Dolly couldn’t help but think about it when she got the news.

Willie Nelson shows up towards the end of the album to duet on the love song “From Here to the Moon and Back,” the kind of easygoing, unshowy balladry that Willie is known for built atop a gently swaying rhythm and strings. There’s even a harmonica solo courtesy of Willie’s old Stardust collaborator Mickey Raphael, and a guitar solo with his distinctive tone. It’s not flashy, but it’s lovely, just what you’d expect from two old masters.

Dolly Parton #44: Those Were the Days (2005)

As I mentioned in the last post about Dolly Parton’s mammoth collection For God and Country, the post 9/11 era in America was a strange time. Reeling from a mass trauma unseen since the days of Pearl Harbor and an overseas conflict that most Americans supported even if they didn’t exactly understand it, it was the dawn of a new age in American politics whose ripple effects are still being felt to this day. America was a long way from its post-WWII glory days, less a beacon for Democracy than a world superpower with revenge on its mind.

Of course, time has a way of simplifying things, of making shades of gray look a whole lot more black and white, like an old Xerox machine. The post-war years in America are remembered as a time of prosperity, but that was only really ever true for a select few of its citizens. As the 40s bled into the 50s bled into the 60s, the children of that postwar generation began to use their freedoms to question authority and whether the promise of America was being shared equally among everyone, and popular song became a medium for speaking truth to power in a way it hadn’t before.

I bring this up because this is by and large the era that Dolly draws from on Those Were the Days, her first all-covers album since Treasures back in 1996. Pulling from the vast repertoire of the 60s folk and country boom, it includes a number of songs that were considered protest anthems in their day, though Dolly once again went out of her way to tell everyone she wasn’t trying to make any kind of political statement. Regardless of her intentions, I think it does add an interesting dimension to its seemingly wistful title; the past is often something we long for, but we shouldn’t look at it with rose colored glasses.

This is evident from the jump on the title track, a big hit for Mary Hopkin back in the 60s, itself adapted from an old Russian folk song. The lyrics find the narrator thinking back to the innocent days of yore, drinking and dancing in an old tavern, back when it felt like anything was possible. But of course, the good times never last, and the narrator catches her aged reflection in a window and wonders “was that lonely woman really me?” Putting this song up front signals that, while we can look back fondly on times gone by, dwelling on them too much can end up making us miserable.

Interestingly enough, Dolly used her innate star power to recruit many of the original artists to guest on these songs, along with a slew of other guest stars. Hopkin is credited on the recording of her hit alongside a murderer’s row of Nashville singers assembled by Dolly’s old boss Porter Wagoner, also credited, along with British post-punk band the Moscow Circus, who provide some appropriately Russian ambience.

Most of Dolly’s renditions are pretty straightforward, using her recent sonic palette of guitar, banjo, mandolin, fiddle, and dobro. Her voice is in fine form throughout, and her takes on classics like Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” (evidently Dylan declined to take part for some foolish reason) or Kris Kristofferson’s “Me and Bobby McGee” might not be revelatory, but serve to highlight how good these songs were in the first place. When she does mix things up a bit, those tend to be the best parts of the album, like turning Joni Mitchell’s ruminative folk ballad “Both Sides Now” into an uptempo bluegrass ripper (Mitchell was supposed to take part but had to drop out due to an illness in the family). Her take on “Crimson and Clover,” featuring original artist Tommy James, retains the dreamy psychedelia of the original but fuses it with traditional instrumentation.

Most of the guests Dolly brings in are barely recognizable, content to just hang out in the background and let Dolly take the reins. You wouldn’t know Cat Stevens guests on his own song “Where Do the Children Play,” or that Roger McGuinn is backing her on her take on the Byrds’ classic “Turn, Turn, Turn,” but knowing that they’re there all the same enriches the experience. There’s plenty of non-original guests as well, from Norah Jones and Lee Ann Womack’s harmonies on “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” to Nickel Creek’s instrumental and vocal prowess helping to lift up “Blowin’ in the Wind,” to regular collaborators Alison Krauss and Dan Tyminski joining forces with Mindy Smith to lend some extra emotional depth to “The Cruel War,” the album’s only traditional song.

When the guests do make their presence known, it gets a bit distracting. Contemporary country stars Keith Urban and Joe Nichols trade verses with Dolly on “The Twelfth of Never” and “If I Were a Carpenter,” respectively, in what I can only assume was a feint to country radio, though interestingly only “The Twelfth of Never” was released as a single, and the third single at that. I’m sure all of them were more than happy to lend a hand to Dolly, and maybe soak up a bit of her cred as a result.

Covers albums always feel a bit inessential, even when they’re good, and Those Were the Days is a pretty good one. Some critics at the time noted the seeming incongruity of following up an uber-patriotic and religious collection like For God and Country with one that included tracks that were skeptical of both patriotism and religion, but such is the dichotomy of Dolly Parton. I believe her to be a genuinely religious and patriotic person, but also someone who doesn’t want to see those things tip over into dogma or jingoism. In recent years, we’ve seen the effect that an abundance of either of these beliefs can have on our way of life when believers try to foist them onto others, so maybe Dolly was just trying to level out the scales. Or maybe she just wanted to make a covers album of some mid-century hits that she liked. Hell, maybe it’s both. I would’t put it past her.

Dolly Parton #42: Halos & Horns (2002)

Hot on the heels of the critical and commercial success of Little Sparrow, Dolly Parton just couldn’t stop writing songs. They seemed to pour out of her, in a tide that hadn’t been seen in years. Originally intending to jump into the studio to record some demos, she recruited some of the top bluegrass pickers and everyone was vibing so well that they ended up fleshing out a whole new album. The result was Halos & Horns, the third in her acclaimed bluegrass trilogy and the first to be made up of nearly all Dolly originals. It wasn’t quite as well received by the critics as its two predecessors, but gave Dolly her best showing on the charts in years, peaking at #58 on the Billboard 200 and #4 on the country charts.

Halos & Horns is a mix of brand-new Dolly songs and a few old ones, including some she’d already recorded and some she’d never gotten around to. She kicks things off with the title track, which sets up the album’s theme of dualities, of spiritual faith vs. human struggles. Over a 3/4 time bluegrass waltz with all the trimmings, Dolly sings about how we all struggle with the light and the dark, with sin and salvation, that none of us are perfect and we all must face temptations that lead us astray.

Dolly doesn’t always explore this idea directly throughout, but her songs seem to bounce back and forth in the way she’s always been good at. “Sugar Hill” stays in an earthbound lane, but it’s a happy one, as Dolly’s narrator reflects on the simple joys of going to the titular spot with her teenage boyfriend, “swimming naked / showing more than we should’ve showed.” This isn’t framed in any prudish or moralistic way, but rather as the innocence of youth; and in any case, its young lovers stayed together and still go skinny dipping every once in a while.

There’s plenty to like throughout the album, on both sides of the coin. One of the older songs, “Not for Me,” originally written about 35 years earlier, is a heartbroken song of rejection and despair, where Dolly’s narrator sees the happy things in life as being completely out of her reach. She appeals to the Almighty directly on “Hello God,” a song she wrote after the September 11th attacks, pleading for his help to solve the strife and violence of the world. It gets a bit overwrought when the backing choir comes in, but I appreciate Dolly’s willingness to call out the hypocrisy of religion, saying “we fight, we kill each other / in your name, defending you.” She doesn’t end the song with any assurance that God is going to help, just more questions.

In the re-do pile, we’ve got “Shattered Image,” originally recorded back on 1976’s All I Can Do, but sadly still relevant in today’s world, if not more so. If you recall, it’s a takedown of the tabloid industry that seeks to defame and tear down without addressing the flaws in their own lives, something that’s become much easier in the 20-odd years since this version was released, when anyone can troll a celebrity on social media. There’s also “What a Heartache,” a song Dolly’s recorded twice before, once for the soundtrack to the infamous flop Rhinestone and again for 1993’s Eagle When She Flies. Here, it’s given a droning tone underpinning Dolly’s heartbroken vocal lamenting the time wasted on a bad lover, and it remains a beautiful song with a hint of bitterness.

Dolly’s always been good at story songs, and I particularly liked “These Old Bones,” about a young woman who’s fascinated with the old fortune-telling hag in her town, and finds out they have more in common than she thought. I can’t recall another time when Dolly’s done a character voice, but she gives the old soothsayer a nasally drawl that contrasts with her usual tone. The whole thing has a sense of cheeky humor to it, and Dolly plays the fortune teller with a knowing wink; she knows what’s going to happen, but she ain’t tellin’.

Also in the cheeky humor camp is “I’m Gone,” a classic Dolly kiss-off song as she packs her things and leaves a shitty lover. The list of possible excuses she gives him is pretty funny stuff, everything from “I’m in the Himalayas on some spiritual quest” to “I’m in the witness program with the FBI” to “a UFO abducted me from home.” In the end, she doesn’t really care what he says, because she’s not going to be around anyway. It feels like the sort of track Dolly might have written early in her career, back in the “Something Fishy” days, and it’s a welcome reprieve from the spiritual searching of most of the album.

The album is mostly originals, but Dolly does turn in a couple covers. The first, an uptempo take on soft rock punching bag Bread’s song “If,” is pretty unremarkable, but she saves the best for the last song on the album: her take on “Stairway to Heaven.” Dolly’s said many times how much she loves the Led Zeppelin classic, and her song “We Used To” from way back in 1975 even had a similar guitar intro. Evidently she was very nervous to get Jimmy Page and Robert Plant’s approval, but apparently they loved her version and signed off on a few lyrical changes. Dolly doesn’t reinvent the song, but brings it into a stirring gospel gear, changing its hard rock breakdown into a swelling gospel choir and swapping Zeppelin’s rock instrumentation for her palette of traditional instruments. It’s a worthy cover, and really, she needn’t have worried what Plant and Page thought of it anyway, but that’s just the kind of person Dolly is.

If I can knock Halos & Horns for one thing, it would be its length. At 14 tracks and nearly an hour, it could’ve stood to trim off a few songs and would’ve been tighter and even stronger than it already is, though I guess it’s a bit silly to complain about too many Dolly songs, as if there is such a thing. As it is, I have to agree that it doesn’t quite dethrone The Grass is Blue or Little Sparrow (especially Little Sparrow), but it’s a worthy capper to the trilogy all the same.

Dolly Parton #40: The Grass is Blue (1999)

Well, it finally happened. For the first time in Discographication history, I’ve had to skip an album in an artist’s discography. Precious Memories, Dolly Parton’s second release of 1999, was exclusively available at her theme park Dollywood, and is therefore unavailable on streaming. Even legally questionable YouTube rips don’t seem to be a thing. There are copies available for sale online, but your boy does all this for free and didn’t really want to shell out money to listen to it. So therefore, I must break my heretofore unbreakable code of honor and skip over a release. Trust me when I say, as disappointed as you may be with me, I am twice as disappointed in myself.

But there is an upside, which is that I get to skip to The Grass is Blue, Dolly’s third release of 1999 and the start of her critically acclaimed bluegrass trilogy. Evidently the genesis for the project came when Dolly was having dinner with her producer Steve Buckingham, when he dropped the interesting factoid that bluegrass fans overwhelmingly said she should record a bluegrass album when asked what star they’d like to see tackle the genre. Being a Tennessee native who had been steeped in these sounds since her womb days, it seemed like a gamble worth taking.

So a crack band of bluegrass players was assembled, including mandolin phenom Sam Bush, fiddle extraordinaire Stuart Duncan, and dobro maestro Jerry Douglas, and banjo impresario Jim Mills, with backing vocals from the likes of Alison Krauss and Patty Loveless, to back Dolly up on her first foray into Appalachian music. While not being a huge financial hit (it peaked at #24 on the country albums chart and barely cracked the Billboard 200 at #198), The Grass is Blue was hailed by critics as a rousing success. It represented a new direction for Dolly, who once again found herself without a label after the closing of Decca’s Nashville branch in 1999. She quickly got signed to North Carolina-based Americana label Sugar Hill Records, which feels like a good home for this project.

The Grass is Blue is an intimate, acoustic set made up of a mix of Dolly originals, older traditional tunes, and even a couple unexpected covers. She puts one such cover right up front: “Travelin’ Prayer” by Billy Joel. Starting with plaintive fiddle, mandolin, and bass, it lulls you into a false sense of security before the banjo kicks the door down and reveals a bluegrass raver on the other side. Joel’s original version has some country flavor, but feels almost musical theatre, and Dolly and company bring it comfortably into the realm of bluegrass.

From there, the album stays in a comfortable wheelhouse, ranging from upbeat tunes like Dolly’s “Steady as the Rain” and “Endless Stream of Tears” and slow, melancholy ballads like “A Few Old Memories” and her take on Johnny Cash’s classic “I Still Miss Someone.” Honestly it’s kind of hard to write about stuff like this, because all the songs use the same setup of guitar, mandolin, banjo, fiddle, dobro, bass, and Dolly’s vocals. And her vocals are really killer throughout, forceful and spirited or resigned and heartsick, depending on the song. There’s a confidence and an ease to the whole thing that’s really infectious, like you’ve stumbled into a country bar jam filled with the best players around. Every player gets plenty of opportunities to show their stuff, and that communal sense makes the album a joy to listen to.

The centerpiece of the album, for my money, would have to be Dolly and the band’s take on the traditional tune “Silver Dagger,” a gorgeous, haunting, ethereal piece of work. It’s the only completely traditional tune on the album–other classics like “I’m Gonna Sleep With One Eye Open” still have a more modern provenance, whereas this one goes back to the 19th Century. It starts with a hypnotic circular banjo line and percussive mandolin strums before adding in dobro and fiddle weaving around Dolly’s powerful vocal, singing with the voice of a young woman whose mistrustful mother keeps her from finding a husband. I don’t know enough about music theory to be able to diagnose it, but the whole thing as a slightly eerie, unsettled quality to it that nicely fits the song’s themes. It continues for about 4 minutes before switching gears entirely in its final minute, becoming a 3/4 time instrumental guitar and dobro waltz. It’s an absolutely stunning track.

The album winds down with a re-do of Dolly’s “Will He Be Waiting For Me,” a song going all the way back to her 1972 album Touch Your Woman, followed by another original, the title track. It’s a lovely song, wherein Dolly’s narrator tries to convince herself she’s not heartbroken by telling herself all kinds of contradictory things like “rivers flow backwards, valleys are high / mountains are level, truth is a lie,” culminating with the title phrase. It’s a classic piece of country songwriting, taking something well-known and using it in a novel way. Dolly’s crack backing band cuts out entirely for the final song, a cover of her sister Rachel Dennison’s gospel “I Am Ready,” rendered as an a capella recitation with some stunning harmonies.

The Grass is Blue is an experiment that very much paid off. Maybe Dolly saw how playing traditional tunes and interesting covers in a stripped-down style worked for Johnny Cash on his American Recordings series, and gave Bob Dylan’s career a refresher on Good as I Been to You and World Gone Wrong, but there’s something about hearing a veteran artist strip away all the extra layers that really shows what they’re capable of. In any case, her timing was impeccable; between this and 2000’s O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack, traditional American music made a big comeback at the turn of the 21st Century, and it’s never really gone away. Once again, Dolly was ahead of the curve.

Dolly Parton #39: Trio II (1999)

1987’s Trio has been the most pleasant surprise for me in this project so far; not a surprise that three such incredible artists would make something great together, but that I didn’t expect it to stick with me quite as much as it has. I’ve listened to it several times since, and it’s on my running list of “buy it if I see it in a record store” albums. So as you might imagine, my expectations were sky high for Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, and Linda Ronstadt’s second outing.

The songs for Trio II were actually recorded back in 1994, but issues with labels and personal concerns delayed its release for a full 5 years. In the interim, Ronstadt remixed several of the songs to include on her own 1995 album Feels Like Home, so people who bought that one might feel like this is a bit of a retread at times. But that didn’t stop it from being another success when it was finally released in 1999, not quite on the platinum order of magnitude as its predecessor but still darn good, reaching #4 on the country albums chart and #62 pop, also netting the group a Grammy for best country collaboration with vocals. Not that any of them necessarily needed more accolades, but it’s nice anyway.

So does Trio II manage to recapture the magic of its predecessor? For me at least, it’s a resounding yes. These three women conjure some kind of ineffable magic when they get into a studio together, something that transcends any one of them. All three have very distinct voices, yet they blend together so perfectly. I read an article where Harris said that their voices create something together that is completely different from what they can do on their own, and I think that’s very true. Dolly tried to replicate the first album’s success with Tammy Wynette and Loretta Lynn on Honky Tonk Angels, but as good as that album was, it couldn’t approach the alchemy of this particular union.

Trio II is a cozy, laid back set, mostly staying in a subtle, contemplative lane. When I was listening, I must have written some variation of the word “gentle” at least a dozen times, and I think that’s a pretty apt descriptor. Occasionally they let loose with the fireworks, but for the most part the album is content to stay in a quieter place. When you’re this good, you don’t always need to scream it from the rooftops.

The album has a more bluegrass-heavy feel overall, with prominent fiddle and mandolin on most tracks. Of course, it helps when you’ve got some of the best players in the game, in this case Alison Krauss and Dave Grisman respectively, backing you up. Their song selection reflects this, pulling from the Carter Family, Del McCoury, Harley Allen, and even a younger Dolly Parton for material. It opens with the classic stylings of “Lover’s Return,” the aforementioned Carter Family song, with Ronstadt’s lead vocal underpinned by fingerpicked guitar, mandolin, and fiddle, as the three singers blend together on the chorus. This leads into the contemplative ballad “High Sierra,” another Ronstadt lead with soft guitar and heavenly harmony.

Harris takes lead on “Do I Ever Cross Your Mind,” a song originally written by Dolly in the 70s and first performed as a duet with Chet Atkins. This version slows it down a bit, though still keeps it in a more upbeat rhythm, with dueling mandolin and fiddle solos from Grisman and Krauss. The three then join together to take on Neil Young’s “After the Gold Rush,” Dolly’s second run at the song in just the last few years. They manage to make it even more gorgeous, leaning into its ethereal melody and giving it a dash of gospel flavor.

The album is extremely cohesive, though the spell is somewhat broken on “Blue Train,” a much more contemporary sounding track with reverbed electric guitar and spacey percussion. It’s a good song, but feels like a concession to country radio more than the rest of the album. It reminds me of “Telling Me Lies” from Trio, which also felt a bit out of place, though that one really grew on me so this one probably will too. The group loosens up a bit on “I Feel the Blues Movin’ In,” the Del McCoury-penned track with a bluesy country feel and another sultry fiddle solo from Krauss.

Following this, they give stately readings to Donagh Long’s “You’ll Never Be the Sun,” John Starling’s “He Rode All the Way to Texas,” and Randy Newman’s “Feels Like Home,” which has become something of a standard in the intervening years. It ends with the gorgeous, reflective “When We’re Long, Long Gone,” originally written by country duo The O’Kanes. It’s a bluegrass-flavored waltz-time ballad with mandolin and gently swaying guitar, Harris on lead vocal, and harmonies that pierce right through your heart.

I’m not sure if Trio II quite reaches the heights of its predecessor, but even the greatest sequels rarely do. Despite its slightly fraught creation, there’s a relaxed quality to the album, one that seems to say that we already know the magic that these three ladies can make, so let’s just sit back and let them make it. With Ronstadt’s health issues robbing her of her golden voice, it’s unlikely we’ll get a Trio III, at least on this plane of existence. But at least we’ve got two collections from one of the greatest musical collaborations of all time, country or otherwise.

Dolly Parton #38: Hungry Again (1998)

One look at the cover art for Dolly Parton’s Hungry Again–Dolly dressed plainly in overalls and a henley, her signature blonde bouffant pulled down into a braid, sitting on a porch swing–you might assume that this is a more stripped-down, back to basics affair. And as it turns out, Dolly took that idea to heart more than you might imagine.

It seems hard to fathom now, when her status in pop culture is evergreen, but there was a time where Dolly was in danger of being left behind. As the 90s wore on, a whole new generation of country stars took the spotlight, and legacy acts like Dolly and others were largely left off country radio, playing to their old fans but not really capturing too many new ones. This of course goes double for women, who are largely thought to be past their prime once they reach the ripe old age of 30.

Finding herself without a label after the closing of Rising Tide’s Nashville branch, Dolly decamped to her lake cottage outside Nashville as well as her fabled Tennessee mountain home in Sevierville to write songs away from the pressures of Music Row. This creative monasticism seemed to work for Dolly, emerging afterwards with upwards of 35 new songs that she described at the time as some of her best ever. She’d managed to recapture a spark she’d felt in the early days of her career; Hungry Again wasn’t just a title, it was an ethos.

Deciding that the record needed to remain a family affair, Dolly produced it herself with her cousin Richie Owens, recording it in his basement studio with his band Shinola. The result is easily Dolly’s most stripped down album since the 70s, if not ever. It was well-received by critics as a return to form, though not met with a ton of enthusiasm from the record buying public, making it as high as #23 on the country albums chart and its first single “Honky Tonk Songs” peaking at #74. This didn’t seem to bother Dolly much, in fact it may have been intentional. Making the record seemed creatively and spiritually fulfilling for her, so what if it didn’t catch on among the younger demographic?

Any album made up of all Dolly originals gets an automatic bump in the rankings for me, and Hungry Again is a pretty strong batch of songs delivered with a minimum of fuss. Lyrically it’s all pretty well-worn territory for Dolly at this point, with songs about losing love, struggling to let go, taking some jerk to task, and of course, loving Jesus. That said, few songwriters can find as many ways to express those universal human experiences as Dolly, so it’s still a pleasure regardless. Maybe it’s because I’m so used to the gleaming sheen of professional studio productions at this point, but the mix on Hungry Again sounds surprisingly murky at times, not nearly as crisp as her previous work. I think this, too, is by design; these songs were mostly recorded in a home studio, after all. It might be the most high-profile bedroom pop album since Paul and Linda McCartney’s Ram.

There’s plenty to like throughout Hungry Again, starting with the title track, a 3/4 time acoustic country waltz where Dolly’s narrator implores their partner to help recapture the spark of their early days. Things were less comfortable, but their love had a passion that has naturally cooled with age; not necessarily in a bad way, but she misses that early fire. It’s a relatable sentiment for anyone who’s been in a long-term relationship, and having had similar conversations with my partner recently, I certainly connected to it. The first single “Honky Tonk Songs” is also a good one, one of the few occasions where Dolly’s band does something that could be described as rocking. It’s a bluesy, honky tonk shuffle where Dolly’s narrator tries drinking to forget her sorrow, turning to classic country singers like Merle Haggard and Hank Williams to ease the pain.

“Blue Valley Songbird” is another really good track, a story song that feels like one of Dolly’s 60s or 70s classics, though maybe slightly less bleak than “Down From Dover” or “Gypsy, Joe, and Me.” There’s still darkness to be found in Dolly’s tale of a girl who finds solace and salvation in music, using it as a means to escape her abusive father, who “used and abused her mind and her body.” Dolly thankfully doesn’t fill in the blanks on what that means, but even when her subject finds success, her father still haunts her: “She writes her letter back home to her mama / in care of the preacher in town / they’re sacred to her so she reads them at church / and so her daddy cannot track her down.” It’s a gutting moment, and a reminder that even though she escaped home, she may never be free of her pain, the same pain that informs her music. Dolly definitely softened her approach the more famous she got, but it’s nice to know she can still turn out a heartbreaker when she wants to.

Dolly always saves some of her best spirit for her worship songs, and she turns in a couple great ones here with “When Jesus Comes Calling For Me” and “Shine On.” The former has a sort of unique sound in Dolly’s world, with a slow, thumping beat that almost recalls 90s R&B, paired with wailing harmonica courtesy of cousin Richie. Dolly leads us in with a spoken word intro, framing the song as her recollection of an old man waiting for his time to come so he can be with his family again. There’s no sorrow to it, only joy at the prospect of awaiting his holy reward. “Shine On” is the album’s closer, a classic southern spiritual rendered mostly a capella with a gospel chorus, accompanied only by quiet guitar. The song was recorded in the House of Prayer, the Sevierville church where her grandfather preached and where she attended service in her youth.

Hungry Again finds Dolly on sure footing with probably her most confident set of songs in years. Other artists of her generation railed against their lack of representation on the radio, but Dolly was gracious about it, and I think this album proves that her talent cannot be denied. Country music needed her much more than she needed them, anyway.