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 #46: Better Day (2011)

As the 2000s turned into the 2010s, America was locked in a perpetual state of anxiety. A war overseas had dragged on for nearly a decade, a housing market crash and subsequent recession left many out of work and unable to stay afloat, while the Wall Street bros who caused the whole thing got a massive bailout just to keep the economy from completely tanking. The election of Barack Obama in 2008 brought with it a wave of hope for change, but also brought just as much backlash, much of it racially motivated. Not to mention the steadily mounting threat of climate change that we were even further away from taking seriously. Suffice it to say, it was hard to feel very good about the way things were going.

So leave it to Dolly Parton, pop culture’s eternal optimist, to try to lift our spirits through her chosen medium of song. Dolly said her specific aim with Better Day was to make people feel better, to give us a little hope amid the economic and geopolitical gloom, to remind us that if we keep pushing, keep trying, keep hoping, good times may be around the corner. Dolly’s optimism isn’t exactly naive or wrongheaded. She’s seen tough times before, written plenty of songs with plenty of suffering, but her faith and her belief in the goodness of people has seen her through. Sometimes, choosing to see the good can be a radical act.

Better Day is Dolly’s first album in quite a while to be made up of all originals, though that doesn’t mean the songs are all brand new. Four of them, “I Just Might,” “Get Out and Stay Out,” “Shine Like the Sun,” and “Let Love Grow” were all repurposed from her score for the 9 to 5 musical from a couple years prior, and lead single “Together You and I” dates back to her Porter Wagoner days. It all added up to a decent success, making it to #51 on the Billboard albums chart and #11 country and getting good reviews. It seems that Dolly wasn’t wrong in thinking people might like a little dose of uplift.

She kicks it off by offering some much-needed perspective on “In the Meantime,” reminding us that people have been forseeing doom since the very beginning, and there’s something about the human condition that makes us always think the world’s going to end. But until that happens, we have a choice to aim ourselves towards the good, to try and do right with the time we have, however much time that is. In the decade-plus since this album was released, that feeling of doom has only increased, and it’s important to remember that our generation isn’t the first to feel this way.

Most of the uplift on Better Day is of the more personal variety, with characters choosing to do whatever it takes to improve their lot in life. “Just Leavin'” is a classic Dolly track where the narrator decides to leave an unsupportive partnership in order to strike out on their own; even if that means uncertainty and doubt, it’s better than where they’re at now. “The Sacrifice” feels like a more personal song, where Dolly songs about everything left behind in the pursuit of success. I kept waiting for a turn at the end of the song, that Dolly’s character would realize all that sacrifice wasn’t worth it in the end, but that’s not really what we get. There’s a brief moment of doubt, but it’s quickly cast aside. Is the narrator in denial, or are we to believe it really was worth it? I’m not sure, but it makes for a more interesting song.

The four tracks from 9 to 5 definitely betray their more conversational, musical theatre roots, and their optimism is a little more guarded. “I Just Might” leaves room for doubt that its narrator can truly make it, and “Get Out and Stay Out” is the kind of kiss-off song that Dolly can nail in her sleep. The other two, “Shine Like the Sun” and “Let Love Grow,” are a bit more indistinct, generic uplift anthems that are transformed here into radio-friendly glossy pop.

In general, the album is split between sounds that would have felt right at home on early 2010s country radio and more traditional sounds. The pop-centric stuff doesn’t do much for me, with its “regular pop with pedal steel” kind of vibe, all shimmery electric guitars and steady rhythms. It feels a bit like Dolly trying to bend her style to the popular trends, rather than the other way around (aka the correct way). I’m much more into the traditional style, which Dolly has always pulled off so well. “Country Is As Country Does,” a Mac Davis co-write, is some classic high-stepping country with all the fixin’s, perfectly matched to its theme of pride of place. The title track is one of the album’s best, beginning with bluesy piano and a spoken-word intro before the dobro and shuffling drums kick in, backing Dolly’s sultry vocal with a lazy, easygoing rhythm.

Dolly’s aim with Better Day was to offer a ray of home through the gloom, and wouldn’t you know it, I did feel a little better by the time it was over. The America of 2023 is still a pretty scary place, possibly even more so than 2011, with mounting crises and a frightening tilt towards Nationalism and bigotry. A song can’t save the world, but it can make things just a bit less frightening, at least for a few minutes. There are plenty worse things a star like Dolly could do, that’s for sure.

Dolly Parton #43: For God and Country (2003)

Post-9/11 was a strange time to be an American. We look back on it as a time of solidarity, uniting in the wake of tragedy against a common enemy, standing up for freedom worldwide, saying our ways would not be silenced. But the truth is, of course, far more complicated.

The US invasion of Iraq in 2003 had many adamant critics at the time, people who saw it as a pretense to assert American imperialism, using the war on terror as a justification. 20 years on, many veterans of Operation Iraqi Freedom struggle to understand what their sacrifice was even for, if anything. Back then, it felt like the US had a clear enemy, a clear cause. Nowadays, it’s a hell of a lot more murky.

You probably already know, but I am hardly the one to try and make sense of any of this. I was nearly 11 when the Twin Towers fell, nearly 13 when we invaded Iraq. I only had the fuzziest sense of the whats and the whys, and I don’t know much more now than I did back then. But I can’t help but think back to that strange time in our history, that mix of patriotism and fear, while listening to Dolly Parton’s For God and Country, released in November of 2003, some eight months after the US officially invaded Iraq. It’s an album that feels inextricably linked to its moment in history.

Dolly’s politics have long been a source of speculation, and she’s tried to be very calculatedly apolitical throughout her career, not wanting to ruffle anyone’s feathers or alienate any potential fans. It’s a big part of why she’s managed to create a fanbase in so many disparate groups over the years, from queer city folk to Christian country folk. For God and Country is probably as “political” as Dolly really gets, even if she mostly sticks to things most of us can agree on, like supporting our troops.

To be honest, I was kind of dreading listening to this album. The sort of ra-ra good ol’ US of A stuff is generally very off-putting to me. While there’s nothing wrong with having love of country, patriotism is a complicated thing these days, when the people labeling themselves as “patriots” are the first to try and undermine the very institutions that they claim to love, and any criticism of American policy very quickly gets you labeled as “un-American.” In that way, things haven’t changed that much since the post-9/11 days, very much the nadir of the “with us or against us” mentality.

Not to mention, this album is extremely fucking long. An hour and fifteen minutes of pro-America and/or pro-Jesus songs sounds like my personal idea of torture, even if it’s Dolly Parton doing the singing. But I must say, parts of the album were quite enjoyable, even if I did have to take it in smaller chunks. After a few slabs of overproduced schlock, the album hits a groove of more traditional sounds around the midpoint, which is easily the most enjoyable stretch.

First, the schlock. The album actually starts out pretty promising, with the mostly-acapella prayer “The Lord is My Shepherd.” Dolly sings alongside a faintly-Gregorian backing choir before transitioning into a spoken word prayer as the choir murmurs beneath her. Her take on that old voice-tester “The Star-Spangled Banner” is pretty good too, and Dolly’s more than capable of handling that vocal workout. After that, we get three tracks that almost derail the whole thing.

First is Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA,” possibly the most overwrought pro-America track ever written, here given a big sappy arrangement with synths and booming drums like an 80s ‘ludes flashback. Then, the stone-cold Dolly classic “Light of a Clear Blue Morning” is nearly drowned in over-processed early-00s adult-contempo-pop gloop. This unholy trinity is rounded out by the Civil War ballad “When Johnny Comes Marching Home,” complete with the requisite martial drums and light fife. It’s hard not to giggle when the deep-voiced backing vocalists come in with “America! America!” like something out of Trey Parker and Matt Stone.

Luckily, the album does manage to recover its dignity, particularly in the aforementioned traditional section beginning with a church choir hymnal arrangement of the old gospel track “Whispering Hope,” courtesy of the Harding University Concert Choir and Dallas Christian Sound. This leads into my personal favorite track, “There Will Be Peace in the Valley,” a southern gospel classic and collaboration with the incredible vocal group the Fairfield Four, recent standouts from the O Brother Where Art Thou soundtrack.

Dolly puts spoken word interludes throughout the album, explaining her connection to the songs and relating them to her religious upbringing. Here, she frames it as if she’s snuck off to listen to the music at a Black church and just happened to run into the Fairfield Four, inviting them to sing with her. Their sumptuous harmonies are the driving force behind the song. We then get a couple bluegrass tracks that wouldn’t sound out of place on The Grass is Blue or Little Sparrow: “Red, White, and Bluegrass” and a take on “My Country ‘Tis of Thee.” Both of them are fun, uptempo bluegrass rippers, and it’s clear Dolly’s still enjoying the heck out of playing this music.

Things get a bit wobbly from there, flapping from the soft synth pop balladry of “I’m Gonna Miss You” to the fire and brimstone gospel of “Go to Hell” to her take on former Billboard #1 single “Ballad of the Green Beret” like a flag caught in a windstorm. I nearly puked listening to “Brave Little Soldier,” a song about…child soldiers, I guess? Or at least kids joining in the patriotic effort by pretending to be soldiers? Honestly when the kiddie choir (or maybe adults trying to sound like a kiddie choir, it’s hard to tell) came in, I found it hard to concentrate.

Dolly gives us her own contribution to the over the top pro-America anthem tradition with “Color Me America,” an 80s-style soft rock ballad with a big bombastic chorus. And just when you think we’ve reached a patriotic fever pitch, she ends the album on “The Glory Forever,” a musical rendition of the Lord’s Prayer that bookends the album with “The Lord is My Shepherd.” It’s a lovely note to end on that lends the whole thing more cohesion than its array of styles might suggest.

Truthfully, had Dolly cut out all the overdone cheese from this collection and stuck to her more traditional instincts in gospel and bluegrass, this could’ve been another stellar album in a run of stellar albums. As it is, it’s an album with some highlights buried in all the gloop. Like I said, it was a weird time.

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 #41: Little Sparrow (2001)

After the critical success of The Grass is Blue, it was probably a no-brainer for Dolly Parton and co. to make another bluegrass record. But they didn’t feel the need to rush, and so the follow-up Little Sparrow, was released into the world two years later. It made for another critical success for Dolly even bigger than the last, and became a decent hit on the country album charts, making it to #12, even cracking the top 100 on the pop charts. The album capped off its prestige run by netting Dolly a Grammy for best female vocal performance for “Shine.” Whatever the bluegrass traditionalists thought, it seemed that Dolly was very, very good at making this kind of music. But does Little Sparrow manage to outdo its predecessor?

Well, to my ears, it does it pretty much every respect. The Grass is Blue was a very good album, but Little Sparrow manages to take the same formula and achieve greatness. I’m not sure why this is, if it comes down to song selection or performance or what, since the production and sound are very similar, even carrying over some of the same players like Jerry Douglas, Stuart Duncan, and Alison Krauss. There’s a level of confidence to the whole thing, a certain je ne sais quoi that permeates and takes the album to another level. Maybe Dolly was just feeling more secure after The Grass is Blue was considered a success, comfortable in the knowledge that there was an audience hungry to hear her take on traditional sounds. In any case, she and her crack team of players knocked it out of the park.

Little Sparrow has a similar makeup to its predecessor, consisting of about half Dolly originals and half covers from the worlds of country, traditional, and even rock. It kicks off with the title track, an elegantly haunting minor-key ballad with the sort of English folk flair that illustrates the connection between European and Appalachian traditions. It begins with Dolly’s voice unaccompanied, spinning her tale of a spurned lover represented by the titular, fragile bird, before layering in harmony vocals, guitar, fiddle, mandolin and banjo. The lyrics add to the sense of ancient balladry, using lines like “all ye maidens, hear my warning / never trust the hearts of men.” It’s a bewitching track and a great way to kick off the album.

We then get one of the album’s best and most unexpected moments: a bluegrass cover of Collective Soul’s 90s alternative rock radio staple “Shine.” Translating the song’s distorted rock riffage into fiddles and banjos seems gimmicky, but works amazingly well here. It follows the original template pretty closely, turning its rock breakdown into a full-on bluegrass raver. Dolly’s done the “unexpectedly good bluegrass cover of a rock song” thing before, like her take on REO Speedwagon’s “Time For Me to Fly” back on White Limozeen, and it’s pretty much always delightful.

We then move through her take on the classic country tune “I Don’t Believe You’ve Met My Baby,” a song performed by everyone from the Louvin Brothers to Alison Krauss to Dolly herself back in her Porter Wagoner days. She turns it into a traditional bluegrass ballad with a slight western swing vibe with a robust string intro. It’s followed by a slower version of “My Blue Tears,” a Dolly tune from way back on Coat of Many Colors, transformed from a straightforward close harmony ditty into a lush, mournful ballad. She makes another bluegrass raver out of “Seven Bridges Road,” originally written by outlaw country icon Steve Young and later covered by every music critic’s favorite band, The Eagles.

The album’s midpoint goes through a new Dolly song “Bluer Pastures,” the Restless Heart tune “A Tender Lie,” and a jaunty take on the Cole Porter classic “I Get a Kick Out of You,” before we get a trio of stunning Dolly tunes starting with “Mountain Angel.” A nearly seven-minute Appalachian story song, Dolly lays out a sort of origin story for the town witch, spinning a tragic tale of a once-beautiful woman left devastated and alone after her lover leaves her and her baby dies. She writes it all as hearsay, full of “they say”s, as if this is a tale passed around from mouth to mouth. It lends a painful dignity to the kinds of characters that exist in local legends the world over, the scary old hag who everyone avoids and assumes is in league with the devil, revealed to actually be a normal person driven mad by grief.

After that emotional devastation, Dolly thankfully lightens up on “Marry Me,” an uptempo gospel-tinged bluegrass number featuring clawhammer banjo, fiddle, mandolin, and guitar. There’s an appealing looseness to the track, giving it the feel of a party or a family jam session, the players hooting and hollering for each other. The celebration doesn’t last too long though, as “Marry Me” is followed by a new take on Dolly’s classic, even more devastating ballad “Down From Dover.” If you recall from way back on her 1970 album The Fairest of Them All, “Down From Dover” tells the tale of a young woman vainly waiting on the father of her unborn child to return, left exiled by her family, her hope fading with each passing day. Eventually the baby’s stillborn and it’s clear her lover’s never coming back, leaving her alone and devastated. It was absolutely crushing back then, and it’s still crushing over three decades later. The years have seemed to do little to diminish Dolly’s voice, but she does bring a slight edge of weariness to this new version, as if she’s resigned to her fate or recounting it years later.

The album shifts into a more reflective, spiritual gear in its closing tracks, with the sparse “The Beautiful Lie” and a take on the old Christian Hymn “In the Sweet By and By.” Dolly underlines the Celtic/Appalachian connection by bringing in members of Irish folk band Clannad on the latter track, particularly Mairéad Ní Mhaonaigh delivering an Irish language verse. We end on a brief reprise of “Little Sparrow” rendered ethereal and wordless, suggesting a cyclical nature to the album. You might want to put it on repeat too.

Dolly Parton #31: White Limozeen (1989)

After the critical and commercial disappointment of Rainbow, Dolly Parton closed out the 80s in rip-roaring fashion with White Limozeen, an album that restored her country bonafides and standing on the charts with two more #1 singles, the album itself topping out at #3. After many years chasing–and achieving–crossover success, Dolly was back in the embraces of country’s (ample) bosom. That’s not to say White Limozeen is exactly a stripped down affair, per se; produced by country and bluegrass legend Ricky Skaggs, who also plays several instruments throughout, it’s very much a late-80s country record, with crisp, full production and the occasional 80s studio flourish (can’t give up those gated reverb drums quite yet).

You have to hand it to Dolly and company, opening the album with a bluegrass cover of REO Speedwagon’s classic 1978 power ballad “Time for Me to Fly” is an inspired choice. It comes roaring out of the gate with sprightly banjo and mandolin, as Dolly transforms the peak of 70s studio rock through sheer force of will. The song’s themes of moving on from romantic disappointment sets the tone for most of the album, as Dolly’s characters grapple with the loss of love, or love that’s struggling under the weight of reality.

“Yellow Roses,” one of Dolly’s compositions, uses the titular flower as a symbol for love lost, as Dolly wonders if her former beloved is giving someone else the same flowers he used to give her to feel special. “Slow Healing Heart” is a gentle but forceful country lament about the difficulty of moving on, where you just want the loss to go away even though it’s going to take as long as it takes. “The Moon, the Stars, and Me” is a sorrowful lament that almost feels like a lullaby, with Dolly lamenting that a broken promise of lasting love was a lie not only to her, but to the celestial bodies as well.

Even the couples that are still together aren’t exactly fluorishing. “Why’d You Come In Here Lookin’ Like That,” the album’s first #1 single, paints a picture of a woman dealing with a philandering partner, taking her frustration out on a pretty young thing that just walked into the club, guaranteed to catch his wandering eye. It feels a bit uncomfortable to point the finger at the (presumably) unaware other woman for the man’s lack of self control, but it makes sense from a character point of view, Dolly playing someone who’s not necessarily blaming this other woman for the inevitable outcome, but can’t help but wish the temptation wasn’t there anyway. Bob Carlisle and Randy Thomas (interestingly enough, both known as Christian musicians) wrote the song, but feels like the sort of complicated character song that Dolly would’ve come up with.

Elsewhere, “What is It My Love” follows a sort of classic formula, as Dolly’s character muses about a man who treats her like crap, but who she just can’t seem to quit because there’s just something about him. It’s a tried and true formula that’s been used by both male and female singers for decades, from “You Really Got a Hold On Me” to “Ain’t That Peculiar” to “Upside Down” to “Love on the Brain.”

It’s not all bad vibes, though. “Wait ’til I Get You Home,” a duet with Mac Davis (whose song “In the Ghetto” Dolly covered twenty years prior”) is a fun, cheeky, horny romp about two people who just can’t wait to get alone so they can do stuff to each other. The title track, also co-written by Davis, is one of the rare Dolly songs where a protagonist moves to the city to seek fame and fortune and actually achieves it, the titular symbol of status moving from dream to reality. And the album wraps with “He’s Alive,” a retelling of the Easter story that culminates in probably the most dramatic gospel raver that Dolly’s ever conjured, passionately singing alongside a full choir. It’s a bit much, but Dolly’s always thrown down for Jesus.

White Limozeen is a very enjoyable collection, and finds Dolly on much more solid ground, in a style she’s always sounded most comfortable in. She usually managed to sound good even in the synthiest, furthest-from-country 80s pop trappings, but it’s nice to hear her playing to her strengths again, and I think that sense of comfort and ease is reflected in the music, even if the characters she plays aren’t always feeling it.

Dolly Parton #18: New Harvest…First Gathering (1977)

By 1977, Dolly Parton had already been a recording artist for a decade. At the still-young age of 31, she’d already released a fairly staggering 17 albums, not to mention the dozen duet albums with Porter Wagoner, and she’d had several country #1 singles as well as a few #1 albums to boot. She’d pretty much reached the pinnacle of what a country artist could achieve by that point, but larger pop success had eluded her. She’d had a couple of albums and singles sneak into the lower reaches of the pop charts, with “Jolene” and “I Will Always Love You” being the most obvious examples, but these were generally outliers in her canon.

Many country artists would probably be satisfied with this, but not Dolly, oh no. She wouldn’t be satiated until full pop dominance was achieved. So she fully cut ties with Wagoner, changed management, and relocated to Los Angeles with the goal of crossing over into pop. Out of this major career shift came New Harvest…First Gathering, a transitional album in more ways than one.

I wonder what people thought of New Harvest when it came out, with most of its songs barely resembling country at all. Were her regular fans alienated by this change, or did they love it? It’s tempting to frame it as some kind of major 180, but truthfully Dolly had dabbled in a lot of these styles before; New Harvest just has more of them put together. In any event, they must have not hated it too much, as the album became another country #1 for Dolly, and reached as high as #71 on the pop charts, a fair bit higher than her last crossover success, Joshua.

Dolly revels in her newfound freedom right out of the gate with the album’s first single “Light of a Clear Blue Morning,” a steadily building gospel leaning track with a big shoutalong chorus. She sings about the promise of a new day, and it’s pretty clear she’s referencing the liberated feeling of not having to be beholden to anyone’s influence on her music, but like many Dolly songs, it’s malleable enough to mean a lot of things to a lot of people. It’s no wonder it’s another of her most enduring songs.

The “Gathering” part of the album’s title feels very apt, as the personnel list is fucking massive. Most of Dolly’s previous albums had felt like more intimate affairs, with a band of session cats and the occasional string section or backing chorus, but New Harvest is a full on blowout. Dolly produced the album herself, and was able to use some of her clout to bring in a lot of guests. This is probably most evident on the second track “Applejack,” one of the few overtly country songs on the album. Over bluesy fingerstyle guitar, harmonica, and banjo, Dolly spins a tale of a banjo-picking distiller from back home, as a murderer’s row of guests sing with her on the chorus. Several members of the Parton family are in there, including her mom and dad, alongside fellow country legends like Chet Atkins, Roy Acuff, Ernest Tubb, Kitty Wells, and Hee Haw’s Minnie Pearl, among others. I listened to a radio interview where Dolly talked about including the candid studio chatter, captured when the assembled choir were unaware they were being recorded, which only adds to the fun country gathering vibe the song is going for.

Eager to stretch herself beyond her usual country confines (at least more than she’d already done), Dolly even turns in a couple covers of classic R&B songs, albeit in renditions that don’t much resemble the originals. She updates the Temptations classic “My Girl” into the gender-neutral “My Love,” turning it into a slow and breathy ballad that almost sounds like “quiet storm” R&B at times. Her version of “(Your Love Has Lifted Me) Higher,” that perennial classic made famous by Jackie Wilson, feels like a sort of odd country-disco hyrbid, with a “4 on the floor” beat that wouldn’t sound out of place in a dance club, were it not for the fiddle and banjo fluorishes at least. I’m not sure if Dolly was intentionally trying to enfold disco sounds, but disco was on its way to pop chart dominance at this point, so it’s entirely possible.

There’s a strong sense of trying hard to shake up her image throughout the album, which leads to some interesting sonic diversions and new guises. You’ve got ballads like “You Are,” which start out slow and hushed before blooming into big and bombastic, like Dolly trying to beat her future coverer Whitney Houston to her own sound by a few years. “How Does It Feel” has a sort of proto-“9 to 5” sound, with pounding piano and synths, alternating between a Motown-esque “bum..bumbum” rhythm and straight 4/4. Then you’ve got whatsits like “Getting in My Way,” which sounds a bit like disco and a bit like countrified R&B, with a guitar lick that flirts with Afropop (I’m not sure to what extent Dolly, or really America in general, was aware of that music at this time, or if it just filtered down through the cultural stew that is American music).

The album closer “There” starts out with deep murmuring cello underpinning minor key acoustic guitar that sounds like Dolly’s dipping back into the Led Zeppelin sonic pool, before transitioning into a big ecstatic worship song with a massive choir, ending the album on a triumphant note. None of this is “traditional” country, but Dolly had long been redefining what that meant to a new generation anyway.

New Harvest…First Gathering is a massive album, one where Dolly’s ambitions are in full flower. Unencumbered by the influence of Wagoner, or really anyone else, Dolly lets it all out, signaling to the world that she’s got far more in store than just the cute country singer she’d been known to be so far. That’s still in there, but it’s one facet of the multitudes that Dolly contains.

Dolly Parton #17: All I Can Do (1976)

Dolly took an uncharacteristically long break between albums after Dolly; almost a year went by before she released the follow-up All I Can Do in August of 1976. All that time seemed to pay off, as All I Can Do is probably her best record since Jolene, a fun and spirited set of songs that’s generally much more upbeat than her past couple outings.

I hadn’t even noticed at the time, but Dolly’s regular producer Bob Ferguson has been absent for the past couple albums; Porter Wagoner was the sole credited producer on Dolly, and he co-produces with Dolly on this album. This would be the last solo Dolly album that would have any involvement from him, though the two would continue to release duets for a while longer. I’m not sure exactly what the division of labor was on the album, but the arrangements are generally pretty stellar, making use of the Lea Jane Singers backing choir to create a stirring, gospel-leaning sound. It seems that the public enjoyed this more upbeat side of Dolly, as both the album and title track made it as high as #3 on the country charts. Not the #1s she’d been enjoying, but pretty good nonetheless.

When I listen through an album, I take some brief notes to help my future self have a sense of the feeling of a song, and most of these tracks are peppered with adjectives like “chugging,” “driving,” “charging,” “strutting,” which I think encapsulates the feel of the album. Even the requisite breakup song “Falling Out of Love With Me,” where Dolly’s narrator quits a relationship before the other person can quit first, moves with a jaunty rhythm. It doesn’t slow down until side 2, when Dolly covers the Emmylou Harris tune “Boulder to Birmingham,” the rare Dolly tune to extend past the 4 minute mark. Dolly takes her time with it, giving it a slow-burn gospel power that matches the deep wells of grief in the song. Harris co-wrote the song with Starland Vocal Band’s (aka the group behind “Afternoon Delight”) Bob Danoff about her grief at the passing of her friend Gram Parsons, with whom she recorded several songs. Harris’s version is stirring, and Dolly doesn’t do too much to change it, but she doesn’t have to; it’s a gorgeous, deeply moving song that works in both of their hands.

Dolly’s originals are no slouch on the album either. Plenty of songs deal with love, their gospel trappings conflating the romantic with the sacred. “All I Can Do” finds Dolly’s narrator just looking for a short fling, but falling for the guy anyway. She carries this through to the second track “The Fire That Keeps You Warm,” where she offers to be the support and strength that her partner needs. “When the Sun Goes Down Tomorrow” is another of Dolly’s classic “going home” songs, where her narrator leaves the stifling confines of the big city, hoping that her lost love is still back home waiting for her.

One song that isn’t so rosy is the third single “Shattered Image,” which didn’t chart, probably because it contains a bit too much truth. In it, Dolly takes aim at the haters who seek to ruin her image with spurious rumors, using the metaphor of obliterating her reflection in a river by dropping stones into it. She uses some pretty classic “people in glass houses” kind of imagery, along with the wonderfully succinct line “stay out of my closet if your own’s full of trash.” I don’t think Dolly’s ever confirmed it, but she was beginning to become tabloid fodder around this time, and it’s speculated that this song is in response to that. She has said that it’s meant more generally, about the town gossip as much as the tabloids, and it certainly fits with all of that.

All I Can Do is a pretty terrific album from Dolly, and feels like a breath of fresh air after the last couple, which were generally lovely but felt a bit plodding in their moroseness. Dolly sounds great throughout, and the Lea Jane Singers add a great deal to her songs, their tight harmonies swelling or lilting depending on the mood. I’m excited to see where she goes from here without the guiding influence of Wagoner; I already know it’s only further into the stratosphere.

Dolly Parton #16: Dolly (1975)

Dolly’s second album of 1975, simply titled Dolly, builds on the romantic desolation of The Bargain Store for another set of regretful laments and the occasional song about a living, breathing love. The album these days is often referred to as Dolly: The Seeker/We Used To, which is an incredibly ungainly title used to differentiate it from a career-spanning box set that came out in 2009. So if you’re looking it up on Spotify, use the longer title. It sadly broke the streak of country #1 singles for Dolly, with its second single “The Seeker” making it as close as #2.

Dolly isn’t quite as strong of a collection as The Bargain Store, focusing largely on variations on the theme of remembering lost loves in a way that gets a bit repetitive after a while. Pretty much the whole first side of the album is made up of slow, sad laments, starting with “We Used To,” which opens with a guitar line that is nearly identical to Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” from four years prior, so much so that for a moment I wondered if Spotify had miscategorized the song by mistake. To my knowledge, Zeppelin never sued Dolly for infringement, but honestly, they could have. Dolly has gone on record as a Zeppelin fan, and even covered “Stairway” herself at one point, but the similarity here is startling.

Anyway, sad laments. “We Used To,” “The Love I Used to Call Mine,” “My Heart Started Breaking,” and “Most of All, Why?” are all sung from the point of view of someone remembering a love that’s died, or about to die, and wondering what happened to make it die in the first place. It’s not until the side 1 closer “Bobby’s Arms” that Dolly seems to break out of this funk, delivering a slowly swaying country gospel about the loving arms of a man. Dolly even sounds tired and withdrawn on a lot of these songs, which could be a performance choice but also could be genuine given how relentless her album releases have been. In any case, it works well for the material, giving these plaintive ballads a mournful air.

For a while, I thought maybe Dolly was going to do a sort of “night into day” thing with the album, starting with a side of all sad breakup songs before switching gears into more upbeat fare about thriving romance, but that’s not really what we get. Side 2 does perk up for a while before the romantic longing sets in again on the last couple tracks. The opening track is “The Seeker,” a subtly driving gospel rocker with chugging guitar and a steady rhythm that feels like it wants to break open at any moment. And it does, briefly, but mostly keeps a lid on things, building an air of tension and release. The song rides its groove for a while before ending kind of abruptly, as if Dolly and co. could’ve kept going but didn’t want it to go on too long. It’s easy to see why this song was the bigger hit of the two singles; it’s a fun number that cuts through the downcast, ruminative mood of the album like a light from heaven.

The album shifts back into a more reserved gear after that, though it does occasionally burst to life on the strength of Dolly’s voice and her backing vocals, credited to both the Lea Jane Singers and the Nashville Edition. “Hold Me” and “Because I Love You” are both odes to a love in full flower, but sadly, the joyful times don’t last long. “Only the Memory Remains” and “I’ll Remember You as Mine” find Dolly’s characters back in the longing place, left with nothing more than to remember what they’ve lost.

It’s interesting–Dolly’s been on a bit of a roll in her career, breaking away from Porter Wagoner and proving she had the juice to be a successful solo artist, but I feel like her music is starting to show some signs of fatigue. So many of these songs cover the same emotional ground with only the occasional divergence that they’ve started to feel pretty samey. I wonder how it would’ve felt at the time, where another Dolly album was only a few months away, but listening to them in order like this can’t help but wear me down a bit. They’re always impeccably produced and performed, and the songs are solidly constructed even if they tend to tread water lyrically. Maybe if they were spaced out a bit more, it wouldn’t be so noticeable, but I can’t help hoping the rest of the 70s might find Dolly switching things up a bit.

Dolly Parton #8: Coat of Many Colors (1971)

Dolly Parton just couldn’t be stopped.

Six months after dropping Joshua, Dolly was back with her third album of 1971, Coat of Many Colors. Not only was she insanely prolific at this time, but the country record buying public was still receptive to her charms; it didn’t quite do as well as Joshua, but it came pretty darn close, making it to #7 on the country album charts and its title track getting as high as #4 on the singles charts. Even more than that, Coat of Many Colors is considered one of Dolly’s finest albums, earning retrospective raves and making it onto more than one “greatest albums of all time” lists. But is it worth all that praise?

Well, I don’t know, but it’s pretty darn good anyway. It’s an overall brighter album than some of her recent work, though with that comes a loss of some of the specificity that makes her best songs such strong pieces of songwriting. She starts off on the right foot with the title track, which has come to be considered one of her best and most enduring songs (Dolly herself considers it a favorite), a timeless ode to being poor in money but rich in spirit. Inspired by Dolly’s impoverished upbringing, her narrator reflects on her childhood and the coat her mother made for her out of a box of old rags. Relating to the biblical tale of Joseph’s multicolored coat, the narrator is extremely proud of her coat and can’t wait to show it off, only to face ridicule from her classmates. It speaks to the innocence of youth and the power of perspective; where other kids see a ratty coat made of rags, Dolly sees something beautiful and made with love.

Elsewhere, Dolly moves fluidly between classic midcentury country, Appalachian folk-pop, and groove-heavy country/soul with ease. “Traveling Man,” another beloved song, is a driving country blues with a prominent, slightly funky bassline, as Dolly does a sort of spoken-word quasi-rap, telling the tale of a wayward lover who ends up absconding with the narrator’s mother. It’s a funny twist that stands in sharp contrast to the motherly love on the opening track. “My Blue Tears,” the album’s first single and another gem, feels more reminiscent of Carter Family-esque early country/folk, as the guitar follows the vocal melody and Dolly does close harmony with herself, a trick she pulled on Joshua’s “Letter to Heaven.”

Dolly wrote most of the tunes herself along with three penned by her boss Porter Wagoner, which all fall into the classic country sounds that both of them were known for, with slow and steady rhythms and softly floating pedal steel (this time supplied by Pete Drake instead of Lloyd Green). “If I Lose My Mind” feels like a sequel to some of Dolly’s heartbroken breakup ballads, with a narrator coming home to her mama after being mistreated by a man. “The Mystery of the Mystery” speaks to those things that we as humans just weren’t meant to know about the universe, leaving it in the hands of the Creator to know what it all means. “The Way I See You” finds Dolly singing with quiet, slowly building awe about a partner, gently blown away by their beauty and her love.

I’m always a fan any time Dolly switches things up musically, and she does that in a few cool ways on this album. One of my favorites is “Early Morning Breeze,” a chilled-out, slightly spacey track that almost verges on psych-folk, built mostly on a bass line and Dolly’s interesting vocal melody before soft guitar and drums fade in, coalescing into a strutting groove for a moment before floating away again. Its vibe matches the lyrics, chock full of pastoral imagery and Dolly just enjoying the subtle beauty of nature. “Here I Am” has a sort of gospel/country feel, as Dolly belts over backing vocals on the triumphant chorus, offering her services for love and affection in a no-pressure kind of way. The final track “A Better Place to Live” is a fairly generic plea for peace and understanding that is bolstered by its shifting rhythm, which starts out steady before going syncopated on the chorus and back again.

A lot of the songs on Coat of Many Colors take a more universal approach, speaking to bigger emotions that end up taking away some of the specificity and edge of Dolly’s most memorable songs. One exception would be “She Never Met a Man (She Didn’t Like),” where Dolly’s narrator tries to warn her lover off of leaving her for a particular woman who will in all likelihood grow tired of him before too long and move on to somebody else. Her tone is more sad resignation, she knows she probably can’t stop it from happening, but tries her best to keep him from screwing them both over for something that probably won’t last long anyway. It has the emotional complexity and ambiguity of Dolly’s best compositions. One problem with aiming for broad appeal is that most people don’t want to listen to dark, tragic story songs too often.

Still, Coat of Many Colors is a pretty terrific album with more hits than misses, and includes a few stone-cold classics. Its title track has remained an enduring classic for good reason, its message of gratitude and not listening to the haters continuing to resonate, so much so that they made a whole made-for-TV movie out of it back in 2015. While Dolly may be far from the poverty that the coat represents, it seems like she’s never forgotten to be grateful and choose to see the good in things.