A Holly Dolly Christmas (NOZ Entertainment, Sandollar Productions, CBS=TV, aired December 6, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Charles and I watched last night’s holiday music special, A Holly Dolly Christmas, an hour-long show on CBS that featured Dolly Parton singing the hell out of nine holiday-themed songs and telling some of the familiar anecdotes about her hard-scrabble childhood as one of 11 children born to a tobacco farmer in the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee. The show was absolutely stunning, especially in songs that touched on religion or spirituality -- Parton didn’t do any of the familiar Nativity songs but she did some Christ-themed pieces. She opened with Johnny Marks’ “A Holly Jolly Christmas,” the song that gave her special (and accompanying Christmas album) its punning title, and she was clearly having fun with it, but her second selection was an amazing rendition of the hymn “Precious Memories: which she sang totally a cappella. For the first chorus she was entirely alone; for the rest three other singers joined him to form a gospel quartette with Parton singing an understated but profoundly moving lead. (This was how Elvis Presley wanted to make his 1965 sacred album How Great Thou Art, but without his knowledge or approval the album was remixed to put Elvis’s voice front and center and relegate the other singers to backup status.) Next was a song that summed up much of what Dolly Parton is about: “I’m Coming Home for Christmas,” yet another ode to love and family connections even in the face of dire poverty. (Somehow Dolly Parton can stand -- or sit, as she did through most of this show when she wasn’t actually singing -- dressed in her form-fitting white sequined and tasseled finery and talk about her poor childhood and you believe her, whereas when Jennifer Lopez comes out and sings about how even though she’s rich and famous she’s still “Jenny on the block” the transparent hypocrisy turns my stomach.)

Parton’s next song was “Coat of Many Colors,” which even though I’ve heard the song many times before and sat through the tear-jerking TV-movie made from it (which disappointed me because I’d have liked more about how Dolly got off that mountain and became a Nashville superstar -- as I wrote about it at the time on my moviemagg blog, I was expecting Coal Miner’s Daughter and I got The Waltons), Parton’s simple tale of the coat her mother made for her from scraps (according to the film script, scraps she’d been saving for a quilt for Dolly’s brother, who turned out to be stillborn) moved me to tears again., The next song on the program was “Circle of Love,” which Parton wrote for the Christmas album by her friend and fellow country singer, Jennifer Nettles -- it’s an indication of how great Parton is as a songwriter than she was able to give away a piece of material this good -- and while Dolly gave it a heartfelt rendition the song had moved me even more on The Voice Christmas special, on which she and Nettles sang it as a duet. Then Dolly sang the novelty “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus,” which she included on her new Christmas album because she wanted something funny. After that she sang “Mary, Did You Know?,” which had also been featured on The Voice Christmas special sung in a heartfelt if not particularly unique voice by Jordan Smith. Dolly’s version compared to Smith’s about as you’d expect -- the well-meaning amateur got swamped by the professional -- but it’s still a problematic song. I asked Charles, my authority on all matters Biblical, the question I’d had after Smith’s performance -- wasn’t Mary told all that stuff in the Annunciation? -- and he said it’s not clear just how much of the Jesus story to be Mary got told by the angel, but she was not the naive little girl described in the song and she certainly would have known she was pregnant.

Then Dolly read a poem called “That’s What Christmas Is” -- I wasn’t sure whether she wrote it that way or it was a song and she simply chose to recite the lyrics rather than sing them -- and along the way she explained her literacy project to send books to children to encourage them to learn to read, which she said her father didn’t know how to read or write when she was growing up. (It wasn’t clear whether he ever learned, though it would seem strange if Dolly Parton endowed a project to encourage literacy inspired by her dad and hadn’t paid to have him taught that skill himself.) She then announced a new song called “I Still Believe,” which married her traditional message of faith, love and overcoming life’s obstacles to an au courant hope and prayer for the say when the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic will be over and we’ll be able to walk and talk to each other without those damned masks and “social distancing” requirements. The show closed with a reprise of “A Holly Jolly Christmas” over the closing credits. I give Dolly Parton credit for doing the show simply -- the set was designed to look like a church chapel and there wasn’t any elaborate “production,” just Dolly singing her heart out in a voice that has held up surprisingly well over the years. I also give CBS a lot of credit for trusting Dolly to carry an hour entirely by herself without trotting out a bunch of “guest stars.”