Dolly Parton: Celebrating 50 Years as a Member of the Grand Ole Opry (NBC-TV, “live,” November 26, 2019)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Afterwards I watched a special called Dolly Parton: Celebrating 50 Years as a Member of the Grand Ole Opry which I hadn’t realized that not only was it an old show from NBC on November 26, 2019, I had watched it then and posted to moviemagg about it (it’s available on https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2019/11/dolly-parton-celebrating-50-years-as.html) and had many of the same comments now I did then, including the marvels of her performance in the film Nine to Five (she not only had one of the biggest hits of her career with the theme song, she held her own in the cast with far more experienced actresses like Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin), my irritation at her print-the-legend presentation of the history of women in country music – especially women singing assertively and maintaining their independence from men – with the release of Kitty Wells’ “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky-Tonk Angels” in 1952 (“What about Rose Maddox?” I thundered with the zeal of a recent convert, since I had just discovered this amazing singer and true country-music pioneer on Ken Burns’ eight-part mini-series on country music), and my comments on the rather bizarre history of one of Dolly’s best-known songs – though not in her version, but in Whitney Houston’s – “I Will Always Love You.”

Dolly wrote it originally as a farewell to Porter Wagoner, even though their relationship was just a mentoring one, not a romantic or sexual one. It was nice to see this show again, and though PBS is notorious for deleting several songs when they grab a music special for a TV pledge periodand offering the rest only as a premium for a hefty contribution to the member stations, this time they left out only one song: a version of “Islands in the Stream,” originally recorded by Dolly as a duet with Kenny Rogers (of all people – and naturally her voice totally overpowered his!) in 1983 and performed on the original show by lead singers Hillary Scott and Charles Kelley of the band then known as Lady Antebellum but now called just “Lady A.” It seems that they realized the racist connotations of their original name – the word “antebellum” literally means “before the war” and became part of the “Lost Cause” mythology of the American South as a wonderful land of plantation owners and happy, contented “servants” (i.e., slaves). Indeed, when I first heard of Lady Antebellum I rather grimly joked, “What are they going to call their album – Slavery Was Cool?”