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.
