257. Dolly Parton, "Coat of Many Colors"

 


Way before Dolly was DOLLY, an icon of not just country music but American culture writ large, she was a working (extremely hardworking - 15 albums in 4 years around the time of this one) country songwriter and musician and singer, and this album is a perfect snapshot of this era.  Unlike most country artists (and probably most pop artists), she wrote almost all the songs on this album herself, with some offerings from Porter Wagoner, her longtime collaborator and possibly unfulfilled romance.

The title song is a classic, a true story about Dolly's impoverished childhood and how her mother sewed her a coat out of rags that she wore to school, only to be teased by other kids.  Lots and lots of country artists have songs about their hardscrabble childhoods, but this is one of the most affecting and maybe even defiant you'll ever hear.  Dolly swears it's true; you can even see a reproduction of the titular coat at the Chasing Rainbows museum at Dollywood in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee (one of my wife's top yet-to-be-achieved travel destinations).  The song is a little treacly for me, but as a cynical asshole I am not the target audience.

Good thing for me that this album gets a lot spicier!  In "Taveling Man," the singer's mother tries to keep her from seeing a traveling salesman, natch, but in the end Mom steals her man!  This was not common in my youthful experience.  A few songs later, in "If I Lose My Mind," Dolly is laying out her man troubles to Mama (presumably not the same Mama who ran off with her bf), and the trouble is he wants to swing and she doesn't:

You know how much I've always loved him, Mama
But he done things to me I couldn't understand
Why, he made me watch him love another woman
And he tried to make me love another man

Dang, Dolly!  And this came out in 1971.  Sure, things were getting more open-minded but I was surprised.  It also raises some questions about Wagoner, who actually wrote it.  You can probably tell from the title that "She Never Met a Man (She Didn't Like)" is gonna be a roast, and it is, with Dolly telling her man who's planning to leave her for some thot that she's gonna dump him for the next gas station attendant she comes across.

Not every song is a psychosexual journey.  I was really struck by the... hippiness? I guess?... of "Early Morning Breeze."  A few tweaks in instrumentation and you could see the psych-era Dead pulling this one off.

This is a great example of how they used to make albums.  Recorded almost entirely in two days in RCA Studio B in Nashville, it's a tight 27+ minutes over 10 songs.  Steely Dan could never.

Does this album deserve to be in the Top 500? As I've said before, I'm generally troubled by the paucity of country albums on this list, so I'm pretty much gonna say yes to every country album, but this one would probably be a yes either way.

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