Hello, Dolly

I've been aware of Dolly Parton for a long time. How could you not be? I mean, really? But I was never all that impressed with her. She seemed very silly to me with her Minnie Mouse speaking voice and he gigantic tits, and I wrote her off.

I started to change my mind when I heard her song "Jolene." There was just something about that song that went right past my "Country Music Sucks" border wall (a wall which has long since been torn down, I hasten to point out) and lodged in my brain. And then when I found out that she had written the song "I Will Always Love You"--which was such a gigantic hit for Whitney Houston--well, I have to say that if I were wearing a hat, I'd have taken it off to her, 'cause that was a good song. 

But I didn't buy my first Dolly Parton album until today.

I was grazing in Half-Price Books when I caught the spine of The Grass Is Blue (from 1999). I'm not sure why I picked it up. It might have been because I caught a few minutes of a Whitney Houston tribute last night wherein somebody . . . maybe Jennifer Hudson . . . sang "I Will Always Love You" and that made me think of Dolly. But at any rate, I picked it up and had a look at the track listing, and the first song listed was ""Travelin' Prayer." And I'm one of the 14 people who immediately thought, "I wonder if that is Billy Joel's "Travelin' Prayer"? So I opened the jewel case and had a look at the booklet and sure enough, it was Billy Joel's song. And the cd was only $2.99, which didn't deter me. So I bought it.

Just finished listening to it, and man . . . that was $2.99 well spent. What a good album. Only 4 songs were written by Dolly this time around--"Steady as the Rain," "Endless Stream of Tears," "Will He be Waiting for Me," & "The Grass is Blue"--all of which are at least quite good, and the last of which is superb. But the other nine songs are all very good, too, and include songwriters of such calibre as Johnny Cash & Lester Flatt, so there's that. And oh yeah, Sam Bush and Alison Krauss play on the album, as well as some other kickass folks whose names I didn't recognize but who could well be gigantic stars in bluegrass for all I know. They sure sound like they are.

Think I'll go give it another spin.