Dolly Parton's Mountain Magic Christmas (Sandollar Productions, Mountain Hill Productions, Warner Bros. Television, 2022, re-aired on NBC December 26, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, December 26, one day after Christmas) NBC showed an odd two-hour Christmas special featuring Dolly Parton and shot at “Dollywood,” the theme park she co-owns in Pigeon Park, Tennessee, near the Great Smoky Mountains where she grew up and had the famously impoverished childhood she’s immortalized in “Coat of Many Colors” and many other songs. It was promoted during the Jeopardy! episode that night as Christmas in Dollywood, which caused me to do a double take since it’s highly unusual for a network to run a Christmas-themed special the day after Christmas. It turned out to be a two-year-old special originally filmed by Sandollar Productions, Mountain Hill Productions, and Warner Bros. Television. The original title was Dolly Parton’s Mountain Magic Christmas and it featured a plot, of sorts – the original white female director of Dolly Parton’s Christmas special walks out at the last minute to do the Radio City Music Hall Christmas show, and her replacement, an ambitious young Black woman, wants to add lots more dancers, choreographers and “production values” to what Our Dolly was planning as an intimate Christmas special. Basically the plot is just an excuse to show Dolly Parton singing; she opens with excerpts from two of her best-known songs, “I Will Always Love You” (which she actually wrote, though Whitney Houston had the hit – a rare example of a Black artist taking a hit away from a white one when it usually worked the other way around!) and “Nine to Five,” which alas are cut off way too quickly. Then we get Dolly singing “Mountain Magic,” the song which would provide the overall theme for the show, and afterwards she sings a medley of “Go Tell It On the Mountain” (I’ve long believed Bruce Cockburn’s recording of this is the best by a white artist; then I heard Johnny Cash’s version and he gave Cockburn a run for his money, but Dolly’s version, though good, is hardly in the same league as Cockburn or Cash), “Away in a Manger” and “He Lives!,” which sounds like it was written for Frankenstein: The Musical but is actually a gospel/country song by Alan Jackson.

The “mountain magic” gimmick is then used to showcase a number of guest stars with the conceit that, like most movie ghosts, the person playing the lead role can see and interact with them but nobody else can. The more director Joe Lazarov and writer David Rambo did shot-reverse shot edits in which Dolly Parton can see the guest star but others in the scene (including a quite cute tow-headed kid whom Dolly introduces as her great-grandnephew), the more I got tired of the gimmick. There are also other annoying plot devices in Rambo’s script, including a mini-diary Dolly Parton supposedly started as a little girl which other people keep giving her copies of, and a pencil which she keeps down her famously ample cleavage with which to write in it. At least the “plot” gives Dolly an excuse to introduce and sing with a variety of guest stars, of whom the first is NBC late-night host Jimmy Fallon. He has something of a voice – one imdb.com reviewer accused him of using AutoTune, but he's done some nice singing on his show – and he and Dolly sing a duet called “Almost Too Early for Christmas” in which she holds back enough to give him a fighting chance. It didn’t help his cause much that the show’s costume designers clad him in an atrocious black-leather outfit reminiscent of Henry Winkler on Happy Days, and the director, vocal coaches or whatever had him use an embarrassingly bad Southern accent (especially compared to Dolly’s real one!). Next Dolly brought on a country singer as legendary as she is: Willie Nelson, who duetted with her on “Pretty Paper,” a Christmas song which Nelson wrote and sold to country-rock singer Roy Orbison in 1963. Then the dance troupe showed up and did a rather messy version of “Mountain Magic,” redeemed only by Dolly’s vocal – following which she led the dance company in a hot version of her song “Go to Hell.” The number for that one featured a guy supposedly playing Satan, dressed in an all-black costume; they would have the sexiest guy in the show playing the Devil! Then Dolly did a promotion for a charity she’s run for years to collect books and donate them to poor children in out-of-the-way locations, and as part of that she sang a medley of “Books, Books, Books” and “I Believe in Santa Claus” with a children’s choir.

After that Dolly did an anthem to acceptance called “Whatever You Are, Be That,” to which a reviewer on the imdb.com page took rather striking exception. “Dolly has great success off playing both sides of the fence, i.e. talking about Jesus and the Devil, but then singing about being whatever you feel like, which this movie also does,” they wrote. “She's made a point to cater to all audiences which after all, she is an entertainer, not a preacher.” I guess this person thinks that Dolly Parton should go all fire and brimstone on us and denounce Queer folk as irredeemable sinners, but that’s not Dolly Parton’s form of Christianity any more than it is that of most of my Christian friends. The Dolly Parton who sang “Whatever You Are, Be That” is the same Dolly Parton who not long ago gave an interview to a Queer magazine (in which she said that she, like Elvis, started singing in church) and who acted in the movie Nine to Five with Lesbian comedienne Lily Tomlin. Dolly wrapped up this religious portion of her program with a medley of “The Seeker” (not the one Pete Townshend wrote for The Who as the immediate follow-up to Tommy) and “Hello, God!” Then she brought on a guest star, a Black rocker named Jimmie Allen, for a really hot duet on Chuck Berry’s “Run, Rudolph, Run.” (The song is officially credited to Johnny Marks, who also wrote the original “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” but it sounds so much like Chuck Berry I suspect he either wrote it himself or at least contributed heavily.) After that she sang “Christmas Where We Are” with flash-in-the-pan country music star Billy Ray Cyrus and then another holiday-themed song, “Christmas Is,” with Billy Ray’s daughter Miley Cyrus. I was a bit disappointed that both Cyruses didn’t appear together, but my understanding is there’s a lot of bad blood within the Cyrus family; Miley’s mom left him just before he had a bit hit record with the song “Achy Breaky Heart,” telling him he was a no-account and would never amount to anything. So it’s not surprising that there was no on-screen meeting between the two generations of Cyruses, much to my disappointment.

Next up was a quite marvelous vocal trio of Dolly Parton and her sisters Cassie and Rachel doing a medley of “Prettiest Enemy” and “Family,” after which Dolly did the song that was portrayed as the opening number even though it was the closer: “When Life Is Good Again,” a marvelous anthem to hope and optimism that was especially welcome at this fraught time in our nation’s history. I haven’t liked all of Dolly Parton’s TV work – I’ll never forget when she turned “Coat of Many Colors” from a great and beautiful three-minute song about being a poor kid to a terrible two-hour tear-jerking TV movie that seemed to drone on and on forever (as I joked at the time, “I was expecting Coal Miner's Daughter and I got The Waltons”) – but I certainly liked this show. It neatly balanced the sentimental aspects of Dolly’s music with her fierce independence, her willingness to sing songs like “Whatever You Are, Be That” in the face of likely opposition from some members of her fan base, including the person who wrote that rather hateful review on imdb.com. This Queer boy loves having Dolly Parton as one of our straight allies!