NBC Presents “Dolly Parton: A Celebration of Her 50 Years as a Member of the Grand Ole Opry”
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night NBC-TV put on a two-hour music special featuring country legend Dolly Parton celebrating her 50th anniversary as an official member of the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, Tennessee, which was excellent when Parton herself was on stage but less so when they dredged up a long series of guest artists. I would have preferred it if the guests had sung with Parton instead of just being trotted out either to cover a Parton song or do their own schtick — but Parton’s own voice has held up beautifully and so have her looks. In terms of defying the visible signs of aging she’s the white Tina Turner, and of course she’s had incomparably better luck in the man department (married to the same guy for 53 years). I was a bit put out by her print-the-legend version of the history of women in country music, naming Kitty Wells’ “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky-Tonk Angels” as the first country song in which a woman took an independent, assertive position — what about Rose Maddox? I’ve become quite possessive about Rose Maddox since I discovered her on Ken Burns’ eight-part documentary on the history of country music, but I’ll say it again: there wouldn’t have been Kitty Wells, Wanda Jackson, Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton, and on up to today’s women country stars like Miranda Lambert and Kim Perry if Rose Maddox hadn’t blazed the trail for women to sing country music with fierce independence and raw power. Still, I enjoyed the Dolly Parton show overall and especially the gospel number she did towards the end (remember that Parton, like Elvis Presley, started singing in church — it wasn’t just the great Black singers who started in church choirs!).
The show began with Dolly singing “Nine to Five,” one of her great career triumphs not only because it’s a wonderful song but because it came from a brilliant movie and Parton held her own as an actress with the far more experienced Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin. When I saw the recent — and horrible — movie Horrible Bosses, I wrote, “Through much of the film I found myself wishing a genuine comic genius could have got hold of this premise — what a movie Preston Sturges could have made around this concept! — until I remembered that in the late 1970’s a genuine comic genius, Colin Higgins, did get hold of this premise and made Nine to Five, a brilliantly funny film that also centered around three main characters (women instead of men) and an asshole boss (only one, whom all the heroines work for) they’d like to see dead, but brought a brilliant, anarchic energy to the concept and also did a lot more social commentary on the whole idea of ‘work,’ of why the people of a country that celebrates ‘rugged individualism’ and democratic freedom in the political and social arena passively accepts the regimentation and dictatorial control of bosses in the workplace. Comparing Horrible Bosses to Nine to Five is a sobering lesson in how much the Zeitgeist has changed in the intervening 31 years, from an era in which movies could at least play at criticizing capitalism to one in which the system is sacrosanct and the people subjected to it realize that they really have no alternative but to knuckle under and hope for the best.”
My little digression into political and social commentary above is a good introduction to one of the most remarkable things about country music in general and Dolly Parton’s oeuvre in particular; even a song like “Coat of Many Colors,” which on the surface is a heartwarming, sentimental tale about the coat from quilt scraps Dolly’s mother made for her and sent her to school in — only to get laughed at by the other children with their store-bought finery — is also a slashing attack on the whole concept of consumerism and the idea a lot of parents have (because the capitalist system in general and the advertising industry in particular) that the more money you spend on your kids the more you “love” them. Alas, after Dolly’s brilliant performance of “Nine to Five,” the next song we got was “Islands in the Stream.” which Dolly recorded as a guest artist on Kenny Rogers’ 1983 album Eyes That See in the Dark — and not surprisingly Dolly’s church-bred country soul totally wipes the floor with Rogers’ pop-crooner blandness. The version we got last night was by Lady Antebellum, with their two lead singers, Hillary Scott and Charles Kelley, taking the parts originally sung by Parton and Rogers, respectively — and once again the woman totally outpointed the man. (That’s one of my problems with Lady Antebellum — Hillary Scott is so much more powerful a singer than Charles Kelley her attempts to sing backup to him sound as imbalanced as the late Janis Joplin’s attempts to sing backups to the far less interesting voices of the men in her first group, Big Brother and the Holding Company. My other problem with them is their name: “ante-bellum,” which literally means “before the war,” is the term unreconstructed Southerners still use to describe the alleged golden age of the great plantations and the happy, contented slaves who worked them: I remember bitterly joking when I heard there was a country group called Lady Antebellum, “What are they going to call their album — Slavery Was Cool?”)
Anyway, after one of the endless commercial breaks that inflicted this show (I suspect the total running time would be just about 80 minutes without the commercials) Dolly did one of her earliest hits, “Joshua,” about the unkempt, bearded, legendarily fierce mountain man of her youth, sort of like Mr. Brouckhoff in Meet Me in St. Louis, who she met when she trespassed on his land, he held a gun on her, but eventually she decided he was hot and fell for him. (Dolly hastened to assure us that this is one song of hers that is not autobiographical.) Then as a part of a reminiscence she sang a bit of a singularly beautiful song called “Mirror, Mirror” that could — and should — have had a full rendition. (Much of Dolly’s most powerful singing last night was on these little interstital segments during which she played oddball instruments, including dulcimer and autoharp.) The next song was Dolly’s dulcimer number, “My Tennessee Mountain Sweetheart,” and then Toby Keith came on and did a song called “Kentucky Gambler.” It’s not that great a song — as much as Kenny Rogers’ “The Gambler” has been ridiculed, it’s a better song on the same theme — but I was too relieved that Keith didn’t trot out one of his Right-wing “patriotic” anthems to mind any deficiencies in what he was singing. Afterwards Dolly did “Coat of Many Colors” — which got to be a trial when Dolly produced a two-hour TV movie dramatizing the story but still remains devastatingly effective as a three-minute song (though the movie made clear that the materials for the coat of many colors were collected by Dolly’s mom for a quilt she had planned to make for Dolly’s unborn brother, only she didn’t use them because he was tragically stillborn). Afterwards Dolly sang one of her earliest records, a George Jones cover called “If You Want to Be My Baby” which she performed, powerfully and beautifully, backed only by her own acoustic guitar.
Then Chris Janson came out for a cover of Dolly’s cover of Jimmie Rodgers’ country classic “Muleskinner Blues,” and he did it well enough even though I was irritated he got the first two lines of the lyric wrong (the correct words are “Good morning, Captain; good morning, shine; Do you need another muleskinner out on your new mule line,” and Dolly got them right but Janson got them wrong), and Dolly came back with a veteran banjo player whose name I can’t make out from my notes — it looks like Buck Tuitt or Tritt — for a song called “The Carroll County Accident,” in which the bodies of a man and a woman are found in the wreckage of a train and it turns out from the way the bodies are positioned and the ring one of them was wearing that they were having an extramarital affair. After a brief tribute to the Carter Family in which Dolly sang a bit of “Wildwood Flower” and played autoharp, Emmylou Harris came out with a cover of a Dolly Parton song, “To Daddy.” I still have a bit of resentment that Emmylou Harris had the career Ronee Blakely (who incandescently played the character based on Loretta Lynn in Robert Altman’s 1975 film Nashville) should have, but she, Dolly and Linda Ronstadt made a beautiful couple of albums together and Harris has kept the flame of the true, beautiful old-time country music alive when so much of the “country” being played today is really what we who were young in the 1970’s called “Southern rock,” the music of the Allman Brothers and Lynryd Skynyrd. Dolly next performed “Here You Come Again,” one of the great crossover hits she had in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s that had country radio D.J.’s and the mavens of the Nashville establishment wondering, “Is Dolly still country?” — as if that thick twang (thicker when she speaks than when she sings) would allow her to pass for anything else? Afterwards there was a bit of an old film clip of Dolly — her blonde wig more restrained than the ones she wore later (she told an old joke of hers during the program: “It costs a lot of money to look this cheap”) — singing a surprisingly independent song for the early 1960’s called “Just Because I’m a Woman.”
Then Dierks Bentley covered a Parton song called “Old Flames” — the gist of which is that he can meet all his old flames again and he’ll still stay committed to his current partner because s/he’s better than all of them — for one of the better guest covers of the night (though it still would have worked better if he and Dolly had duetted on it!). Then Dolly did one of her best songs of the night, a tribute to Hank Williams that featured her doing an a cappella version of “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” which she identified as her favorite of Williams’ songs. Almost inevitably this led into a segment featuring Hank Williams, Jr., who’s ballooned to enormous dimensions (would Hank, Sr. have ever looked like this if he’d lived longer? I doubt it!) and who did a medley of “Move It On Over” and “Mind Your Own Business,” which had basically the same melody and were therefore easy to combine. I recall Williams, Jr. demonstrating on the Ken Burns Country Music show that the early rock ’n’ roll classic “Rock Around the Clock” had the same melody as his dad’s “Move It On Over” — which it does, though Williams, Jr. didn’t mention that there’s an earlier source for the melody: the traditional blues song “Your Red Wagon.” (I was also struck that Williams, Jr. and his second guitarist, Bert Walker, were both playing with slides.) After that Dolly blessedly returned with one of her most haunting songs, “Jolene,” which on a recent YouTube comment I counterpointed with Loretta Lynn’s “You Ain’t Woman Enough to Take My Man” because Dolly seemed to be saying, “You are woman enough to take my man — but please don’t.”
After that there were a couple of other covers of Parton songs, Candi Carpenter doing “Little Sparrow” and doing it well (though I suspect Dolly herself would have been even better!) and Margo Price doing the beautiful white-gospel song “The Seeker.” Dolly then did one of her tributes to the greats of old and recalled an old-time banjo player who did a song called “Old Applejack,” playing the banjo herself as well as singing. The finale featured Dolly doing what’s become one of her most famous songs — even though she didn’t have the hit on it: “I Will Always Love You.” I had always read she wrote this song for the 1983 musical The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas until the Ken Burns Country Music documentary said it was actually written much earlier as a sorrowful mixed-emotions parting from Parton’s early mentor, Porter Wagoner, who put her on his country TV show (he patronizingly referred to her as a “girl” and generally treated her in a paternal way that comes off, especially now, as sexist) and built up her career. When she saw that she’d gone as far as she could with Wagoner and she’d have to leave him — they were not a romantic couple, though probably a lot of people back then (including me) had thought they were — in order to pursue the career she had the talent and ambition for, she wrote that bittersweet song about how much she’d always respect her and be grateful for what he did for her, but now she had to leave and make it (or not) on her own. The weird history of “I Will Always Love You” — particularly the way it became a huge hit not for Parton, but for Whitney Houston as the theme song of her film The Bodyguard (usually it’s white artists who take hit songs away from Black ones, but in this case it was the other way around) — can’t help but affect the way we hear it now.
What came over most to me last night was the way comparing the Parton and Houston versions shows my argument that despite the reputation country music has for emotional excess (there’s the old joke, “What do you get when you play a country song backwards? You get your house back, your job back, your car back, your wife back and you sober up,” to which my husband Charles once added, “Yeah, and your mother and your dog come back to life”), the very greatest country singers — Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton among them — have had the gift of understatement. The best country singers deliver the heartfelt, if sometimes overwrought, sentiments of country songs in ways that play against the melodrama (much the way Billie Holiday took the “torch songs” of the 1920’s, with their melodic leaps designed to allow the singer to sob and cry while staying within the melody, and edited out all those gimmicks, sang them simply and straightforwardly with the direct phrasing she’d learned from Louis Armstrong and Lester Young, and made them far more powerful and moving — indeed I’ve argued that Patsy Cline phrased so much like Billie that she, not any of the white jazz singers who deliberately tried to copy Billie, deserves the title “the white Billie Holiday”). Whitney Houston turned “I Will Always Love You” into a big power ballad, showing off those spectacular chops, but it’s Dolly’s version that seems more true to life, more honest and more moving. The show ended with an outro of “Nine to Five” that I assumed would be just an instrumental featuring the crack band the Grand Ole Opry assembled for Dolly’s tribute, but no-o-o-o-o, she joined in and sang the show out just as the closing credits came up. While I’d have liked to hear fewer solo turns from the guest artists and more songs on which they and Dolly sang duets, otherwise this was a great program with a lot of really fine music — and Dolly herself is not only well preserved (though she made a joke about how many plastic surgeons she’s kept in business) but just as exuberant a performer and a personality as she’s always been.
Last night NBC-TV put on a two-hour music special featuring country legend Dolly Parton celebrating her 50th anniversary as an official member of the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, Tennessee, which was excellent when Parton herself was on stage but less so when they dredged up a long series of guest artists. I would have preferred it if the guests had sung with Parton instead of just being trotted out either to cover a Parton song or do their own schtick — but Parton’s own voice has held up beautifully and so have her looks. In terms of defying the visible signs of aging she’s the white Tina Turner, and of course she’s had incomparably better luck in the man department (married to the same guy for 53 years). I was a bit put out by her print-the-legend version of the history of women in country music, naming Kitty Wells’ “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky-Tonk Angels” as the first country song in which a woman took an independent, assertive position — what about Rose Maddox? I’ve become quite possessive about Rose Maddox since I discovered her on Ken Burns’ eight-part documentary on the history of country music, but I’ll say it again: there wouldn’t have been Kitty Wells, Wanda Jackson, Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton, and on up to today’s women country stars like Miranda Lambert and Kim Perry if Rose Maddox hadn’t blazed the trail for women to sing country music with fierce independence and raw power. Still, I enjoyed the Dolly Parton show overall and especially the gospel number she did towards the end (remember that Parton, like Elvis Presley, started singing in church — it wasn’t just the great Black singers who started in church choirs!).
The show began with Dolly singing “Nine to Five,” one of her great career triumphs not only because it’s a wonderful song but because it came from a brilliant movie and Parton held her own as an actress with the far more experienced Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin. When I saw the recent — and horrible — movie Horrible Bosses, I wrote, “Through much of the film I found myself wishing a genuine comic genius could have got hold of this premise — what a movie Preston Sturges could have made around this concept! — until I remembered that in the late 1970’s a genuine comic genius, Colin Higgins, did get hold of this premise and made Nine to Five, a brilliantly funny film that also centered around three main characters (women instead of men) and an asshole boss (only one, whom all the heroines work for) they’d like to see dead, but brought a brilliant, anarchic energy to the concept and also did a lot more social commentary on the whole idea of ‘work,’ of why the people of a country that celebrates ‘rugged individualism’ and democratic freedom in the political and social arena passively accepts the regimentation and dictatorial control of bosses in the workplace. Comparing Horrible Bosses to Nine to Five is a sobering lesson in how much the Zeitgeist has changed in the intervening 31 years, from an era in which movies could at least play at criticizing capitalism to one in which the system is sacrosanct and the people subjected to it realize that they really have no alternative but to knuckle under and hope for the best.”
My little digression into political and social commentary above is a good introduction to one of the most remarkable things about country music in general and Dolly Parton’s oeuvre in particular; even a song like “Coat of Many Colors,” which on the surface is a heartwarming, sentimental tale about the coat from quilt scraps Dolly’s mother made for her and sent her to school in — only to get laughed at by the other children with their store-bought finery — is also a slashing attack on the whole concept of consumerism and the idea a lot of parents have (because the capitalist system in general and the advertising industry in particular) that the more money you spend on your kids the more you “love” them. Alas, after Dolly’s brilliant performance of “Nine to Five,” the next song we got was “Islands in the Stream.” which Dolly recorded as a guest artist on Kenny Rogers’ 1983 album Eyes That See in the Dark — and not surprisingly Dolly’s church-bred country soul totally wipes the floor with Rogers’ pop-crooner blandness. The version we got last night was by Lady Antebellum, with their two lead singers, Hillary Scott and Charles Kelley, taking the parts originally sung by Parton and Rogers, respectively — and once again the woman totally outpointed the man. (That’s one of my problems with Lady Antebellum — Hillary Scott is so much more powerful a singer than Charles Kelley her attempts to sing backup to him sound as imbalanced as the late Janis Joplin’s attempts to sing backups to the far less interesting voices of the men in her first group, Big Brother and the Holding Company. My other problem with them is their name: “ante-bellum,” which literally means “before the war,” is the term unreconstructed Southerners still use to describe the alleged golden age of the great plantations and the happy, contented slaves who worked them: I remember bitterly joking when I heard there was a country group called Lady Antebellum, “What are they going to call their album — Slavery Was Cool?”)
Anyway, after one of the endless commercial breaks that inflicted this show (I suspect the total running time would be just about 80 minutes without the commercials) Dolly did one of her earliest hits, “Joshua,” about the unkempt, bearded, legendarily fierce mountain man of her youth, sort of like Mr. Brouckhoff in Meet Me in St. Louis, who she met when she trespassed on his land, he held a gun on her, but eventually she decided he was hot and fell for him. (Dolly hastened to assure us that this is one song of hers that is not autobiographical.) Then as a part of a reminiscence she sang a bit of a singularly beautiful song called “Mirror, Mirror” that could — and should — have had a full rendition. (Much of Dolly’s most powerful singing last night was on these little interstital segments during which she played oddball instruments, including dulcimer and autoharp.) The next song was Dolly’s dulcimer number, “My Tennessee Mountain Sweetheart,” and then Toby Keith came on and did a song called “Kentucky Gambler.” It’s not that great a song — as much as Kenny Rogers’ “The Gambler” has been ridiculed, it’s a better song on the same theme — but I was too relieved that Keith didn’t trot out one of his Right-wing “patriotic” anthems to mind any deficiencies in what he was singing. Afterwards Dolly did “Coat of Many Colors” — which got to be a trial when Dolly produced a two-hour TV movie dramatizing the story but still remains devastatingly effective as a three-minute song (though the movie made clear that the materials for the coat of many colors were collected by Dolly’s mom for a quilt she had planned to make for Dolly’s unborn brother, only she didn’t use them because he was tragically stillborn). Afterwards Dolly sang one of her earliest records, a George Jones cover called “If You Want to Be My Baby” which she performed, powerfully and beautifully, backed only by her own acoustic guitar.
Then Chris Janson came out for a cover of Dolly’s cover of Jimmie Rodgers’ country classic “Muleskinner Blues,” and he did it well enough even though I was irritated he got the first two lines of the lyric wrong (the correct words are “Good morning, Captain; good morning, shine; Do you need another muleskinner out on your new mule line,” and Dolly got them right but Janson got them wrong), and Dolly came back with a veteran banjo player whose name I can’t make out from my notes — it looks like Buck Tuitt or Tritt — for a song called “The Carroll County Accident,” in which the bodies of a man and a woman are found in the wreckage of a train and it turns out from the way the bodies are positioned and the ring one of them was wearing that they were having an extramarital affair. After a brief tribute to the Carter Family in which Dolly sang a bit of “Wildwood Flower” and played autoharp, Emmylou Harris came out with a cover of a Dolly Parton song, “To Daddy.” I still have a bit of resentment that Emmylou Harris had the career Ronee Blakely (who incandescently played the character based on Loretta Lynn in Robert Altman’s 1975 film Nashville) should have, but she, Dolly and Linda Ronstadt made a beautiful couple of albums together and Harris has kept the flame of the true, beautiful old-time country music alive when so much of the “country” being played today is really what we who were young in the 1970’s called “Southern rock,” the music of the Allman Brothers and Lynryd Skynyrd. Dolly next performed “Here You Come Again,” one of the great crossover hits she had in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s that had country radio D.J.’s and the mavens of the Nashville establishment wondering, “Is Dolly still country?” — as if that thick twang (thicker when she speaks than when she sings) would allow her to pass for anything else? Afterwards there was a bit of an old film clip of Dolly — her blonde wig more restrained than the ones she wore later (she told an old joke of hers during the program: “It costs a lot of money to look this cheap”) — singing a surprisingly independent song for the early 1960’s called “Just Because I’m a Woman.”
Then Dierks Bentley covered a Parton song called “Old Flames” — the gist of which is that he can meet all his old flames again and he’ll still stay committed to his current partner because s/he’s better than all of them — for one of the better guest covers of the night (though it still would have worked better if he and Dolly had duetted on it!). Then Dolly did one of her best songs of the night, a tribute to Hank Williams that featured her doing an a cappella version of “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” which she identified as her favorite of Williams’ songs. Almost inevitably this led into a segment featuring Hank Williams, Jr., who’s ballooned to enormous dimensions (would Hank, Sr. have ever looked like this if he’d lived longer? I doubt it!) and who did a medley of “Move It On Over” and “Mind Your Own Business,” which had basically the same melody and were therefore easy to combine. I recall Williams, Jr. demonstrating on the Ken Burns Country Music show that the early rock ’n’ roll classic “Rock Around the Clock” had the same melody as his dad’s “Move It On Over” — which it does, though Williams, Jr. didn’t mention that there’s an earlier source for the melody: the traditional blues song “Your Red Wagon.” (I was also struck that Williams, Jr. and his second guitarist, Bert Walker, were both playing with slides.) After that Dolly blessedly returned with one of her most haunting songs, “Jolene,” which on a recent YouTube comment I counterpointed with Loretta Lynn’s “You Ain’t Woman Enough to Take My Man” because Dolly seemed to be saying, “You are woman enough to take my man — but please don’t.”
After that there were a couple of other covers of Parton songs, Candi Carpenter doing “Little Sparrow” and doing it well (though I suspect Dolly herself would have been even better!) and Margo Price doing the beautiful white-gospel song “The Seeker.” Dolly then did one of her tributes to the greats of old and recalled an old-time banjo player who did a song called “Old Applejack,” playing the banjo herself as well as singing. The finale featured Dolly doing what’s become one of her most famous songs — even though she didn’t have the hit on it: “I Will Always Love You.” I had always read she wrote this song for the 1983 musical The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas until the Ken Burns Country Music documentary said it was actually written much earlier as a sorrowful mixed-emotions parting from Parton’s early mentor, Porter Wagoner, who put her on his country TV show (he patronizingly referred to her as a “girl” and generally treated her in a paternal way that comes off, especially now, as sexist) and built up her career. When she saw that she’d gone as far as she could with Wagoner and she’d have to leave him — they were not a romantic couple, though probably a lot of people back then (including me) had thought they were — in order to pursue the career she had the talent and ambition for, she wrote that bittersweet song about how much she’d always respect her and be grateful for what he did for her, but now she had to leave and make it (or not) on her own. The weird history of “I Will Always Love You” — particularly the way it became a huge hit not for Parton, but for Whitney Houston as the theme song of her film The Bodyguard (usually it’s white artists who take hit songs away from Black ones, but in this case it was the other way around) — can’t help but affect the way we hear it now.
What came over most to me last night was the way comparing the Parton and Houston versions shows my argument that despite the reputation country music has for emotional excess (there’s the old joke, “What do you get when you play a country song backwards? You get your house back, your job back, your car back, your wife back and you sober up,” to which my husband Charles once added, “Yeah, and your mother and your dog come back to life”), the very greatest country singers — Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton among them — have had the gift of understatement. The best country singers deliver the heartfelt, if sometimes overwrought, sentiments of country songs in ways that play against the melodrama (much the way Billie Holiday took the “torch songs” of the 1920’s, with their melodic leaps designed to allow the singer to sob and cry while staying within the melody, and edited out all those gimmicks, sang them simply and straightforwardly with the direct phrasing she’d learned from Louis Armstrong and Lester Young, and made them far more powerful and moving — indeed I’ve argued that Patsy Cline phrased so much like Billie that she, not any of the white jazz singers who deliberately tried to copy Billie, deserves the title “the white Billie Holiday”). Whitney Houston turned “I Will Always Love You” into a big power ballad, showing off those spectacular chops, but it’s Dolly’s version that seems more true to life, more honest and more moving. The show ended with an outro of “Nine to Five” that I assumed would be just an instrumental featuring the crack band the Grand Ole Opry assembled for Dolly’s tribute, but no-o-o-o-o, she joined in and sang the show out just as the closing credits came up. While I’d have liked to hear fewer solo turns from the guest artists and more songs on which they and Dolly sang duets, otherwise this was a great program with a lot of really fine music — and Dolly herself is not only well preserved (though she made a joke about how many plastic surgeons she’s kept in business) but just as exuberant a performer and a personality as she’s always been.
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