Hello, Dolly

The Bombshell Is Back With a New Album, New Jokes and a Return to Country

By Alan Sculley

The original backwoods blonde returns to the sound that made them, err, her, famous. Photo by Kii Arens

Dolly Parton’s 2008 tour got off to a delayed start after she suffered a back injury in February — a situation bound to prompt some jokes about the cause of the injury. However, in a recent phone interview, Parton was ready to beat any question to the punch line.

“The truth is I just bent over one day to pick something up and I hurt my lower back,” Parton said. “I just kind of popped a disk in my lower back. So I said I know it’s not my boobs. It’s my lower back, and my butt ain’t that big anymore. So it was just one of those freak things, and it’s fine now.”

Parton’s tour, which is expected to run into the fall, comes on the heels of her first mainstream country album in a decade, Backwoods Barbie, released in February.

Shunned by radio since the 1990s, Parton had explored bluegrass in recent years, releasing a trio of studio albums emphasizing her love of the genre, The Grass Is Blue (1999), Little Sparrow (2001) and Halos And Horns (2002), as well as a 2004 concert set, Live And Well, that focused on material from those three CDs.

“I’ve wanted to always have country records, hit records, but as you know country music started changing its colors many years ago,” Parton said. “They had what they called new country, and a lot of the younger people were coming on the scene. They kind of ditched some of us older artists that had a good career. I never bitched about that because country music has been great to me, and radio has been great to me as well.

“And even though I had recorded other country records, I couldn’t get on the charts,” she said. “So I just started doing things like the bluegrass and the more acoustic things, specialized albums, and paying for them myself and then just leasing them to different record labels.”

However, Parton decided to make an album that more closely reflected her signature country sound and went to work on Backwoods Barbie. She wrote nine of the 12 songs on the album, and released it on her own label, Dolly Records. 

“So far we’re getting some good reaction,” she said. “But I would just love to have some chart records on the radio and still be played, because that’s what I love to do.”

For many years, of course, Parton was very familiar with creating country hits.

She arrived in Nashville in the early 1960s and got her big break in 1967 when she was hired by Porter Waggoner as a replacement for singer Norma Jean on his television show.

The stint with Waggoner put Parton in the spotlight, and by the time she left Waggoner in 1974, she had already scored hits such as “Jolene” and “Coat Of Many Colors.”

Her popularity soon exploded. She won the Country Music Awards’ female vocalist of the year in 1975 and 1976, and shifted her sound in more of a pop direction — a move that paid off in a big way when her 1978 single “Here You Come Again,” became a blockbuster hit.

In the 1980s, she added film to her fame, with roles in the hit movies 9 to 5, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, Rhinestone and Steel Magnolias. She also had a hit duet, “Islands in the Stream,” with Kenny Rogers, and joined Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris to make the 1987 album Trio.

But by the early 1990s, country music was shifting toward younger stars, and Parton found herself unable to crack the charts. She said she thinks radio might be more open to her music now, and is promoting Backwoods Barbie with her world tour.

“We have a big old show this time with a little more visuals than we had last year,” Parton said. “Right now, we’re doing ‘Backwoods Barbie,’ ‘Jesus & Gravity’ and ‘Drives Me Crazy’ [a new cover of the Fine Young Cannibals’ pop hit]. We’re doing about four or five of the new tunes, and then, of course, we always have to do our standards like ‘Jolene’ and ‘Coat Of Many Colors,’ ‘I’ll Always Love You,’ ‘9 to 5’ and all that.

“Then we’ve got a few little comedy things,” she said. “I’ll be playing different instruments and I’ve kind of added a little song that Little Jimmie Dickens had out years ago, and the show is called ‘I’m Little But I’m Loud.’ So we’ve kind of worked up a fun little thing with that, so that we can have fun with the audiences.… We do a medley of music from the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, where we just do bits and pieces of songs, featuring different (musicians) in the band. So we have a lot of fun things, hopefully to entertain everybody and entertain ourselves.”

Dolly Parton performs at 8 p.m. on Friday, Oct.17 at Mizner Park Amphitheater, 590 Plaza Real, Boca Raton. Tickets are $38 to $98. Call 561-962-4109 for more information.

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