Although Vanity Fair has dubbed her the "The Queen of Country", Dolly Parton's eminence as a gutsy musician and self-built American icon is too easily taken for granted.
Hits like "9 to 5" and "Islands in the Stream" guarantee sales for the dozens of Dolly compilations available now at your local grocery store. But the folks at Legacy — who call their new box set simply Dolly — recognize that her eventual chart-toppers would've been impossible without her earlier self-exploration and innovation. I remain suspicious of any career-spanning collection that includes neither "Smoky Mountain Memories" nor her cover of "In the Ghetto", but this project is put together with so much love I pardon those omissions. Dolly is a gratifying intellectual and aesthetic experience.
Five reasons you should upgrade whichever "Greatest Hits" or "Essential" Dolly Parton CD/cassette/8-track you already own to this new collection:
01. The Liner Notes. I use the phrase here gingerly because what's included under the guise of "liner notes" is actually a brief picto-biographical book — It even has a spine!
Written by Holly George-Warren, who just published a biography on Gene Autry, the Dolly notes are hands-down the finest Dolly-related liner-material to date. Not that there's much competition: Whereas performers like T.Rex and the Beatles have had their albums rereleased with extensive written explications, thus far even Dolly's vastly acclaimed albums have been reissued without literary treatment. This set admirably corrects that oversight.
In particular I appreciate George-Warren's playful analogies. "If there was a Mount Rushmore of American song," she writes, "the face of Dolly Parton would be front and center." Imagine!
02. The First Ten Tracks. Dolly's first bona-fide hit, "Dumb Blonde," which peaked at #24 on the Billboard country charts in 1967 and opens the Essential Dolly Parton album, is the eleventh track on this collection. Preceding it are nearly a decade's worth of false career starts that I dare you not to enjoy.
"Puppy Love" and "Girl Left Alone", co-written by Dolly and her uncle, Bill Owens, were recorded in 1959. Dolly was thirteen at the time, and they provide a captivating glimpse into Dolly's adolescent perspective on romance: "Pull my pigtails and make me mad / Then you kiss me and make me glad / Sometimes you even make me sad / Still you're the best sweetheart I've ever had". Not hard to see in this the threads that would later weave into tapestries of nuanced love, like "Touch Your Woman" and "God Won't Get You."
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