FEATURE:
Second Spin
Dolly Parton - Better Day
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ON 19th January, it will be…
the seventy-fifth birthday of the iconic Dolly Parton. Her latest album, A Holly Dolly Christmas, is her forty-seventh – and it received some positive reviews. It is amazing to think how successful and consistent Parton has been and how long her career has lasted. From Hello, I'm Dolly in 1967 through to now, she has released some truly terrific albums! One of her best, 9 to 5 and Odd Jobs, turned forty earlier this month and, from working with Porter Wagoner through the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s to her solo work, there has been nobody like Dolly Parton. She has been in the news recently, as it was revealed she played an important role when it came to funding a successful COVID-19 vaccine:
“Country star Dolly Parton has said she feels "very honoured and proud" to have given money to research into one of the most promising Covid-19 vaccines.
In April she announced she was giving $1m (£750,000) to Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville.
That was one of the trial sites for the Moderna vaccine, which is nearly 95% effective according to early data.
Speaking on BBC One's The One Show on Tuesday, Parton said she was "so excited" to hear the news.
"I'm sure many millions of dollars from many people went into that," she told co-presenters Alex Jones and Jermaine Jenas.
"But I just felt so proud to have been part of that little seed money that will hopefully grow into something great and help to heal this world".
From her music, through to her Imagination Library, there seems to be no end to Parton’s positive sides! Although she is an artist who has remained loved through her career, there has been a few albums that have gained mixed reception. 2011’s Better Day got some love from some, but there were others that were less keen on it. I would encourage people to listen to the album as it is underrated and contains some of her finest songs of the last decade. Better Day debuted at number fifty-one on the Billboard 200 albums chart with first week sales of 17,500. The album also debuted at number-eleven on the Billboard Top Country Albums chart. In the U.K., the album was released on 29th August, 2011 and debuted at number-nine on the UK Album Charts - becoming Parton's highest-charting studio album here as well as becoming a number-one on the UK Country Albums Chart. It is clear that the fans love the album, but there have been some who were not so convinced! Parton said in interviews how the songs are thematically linked in terms of hopefulness and inspiration. From warfare and natural disasters to economic strife, Parton was looking around and felt an album with a sunnier heart was what we needed! In this interview with The National Post, she talked about her songwriting:
“I don’t write just to relieve my own anxieties, I write for the people who can’t express themselves,” says Parton, who was encouraged to pursue a career in music after a chance meeting at the Grand Ole Opry with Johnny Cash. “I can’t save the world, but I might be able to save someone today if I can put them in a better mood. The music’s designed to be like a ray of sunshine for all those folks in the dark.”
“I write a little something every day — half a song or a melody or else two or three songs — writing’s the easy part,” she says. “The only difficult part of the matter is seeing everything that you start all the way through. I take my music very seriously, but I’ve never looked at myself that way. I’m only out here to try and make people feel good”.
Better Day is very much a resistance against a lot of tension and strife that was in the world in 2011. I think, in an even tougher year, Better Day seems more appropriate! I want to bring in a couple of reviews soon – one is positive whilst the other is a bit more mixed – but, before then, I want to source from an interview in The Guardian from 2011. I was not too aware of Parton’s background until a few years ago; I did mnot realise what her early life was like. Maybe it is not linked directly to Better Day, but it makes for interesting reading:
“Speaking of those millions, a huge part of Parton's legend is her poverty-stricken backstory and she makes as many references to what she calls her "hillbilly ways" in conversation as she does in her songs. "I'm just a simple silly country girl!" she says more than once. It should perhaps be interjected here that this simple silly country girl owns 15 properties spread out between Tennessee and California. Her management takes great pains to tell me later that Parton prefers to travel by bus than plane when she tours, as though this proves her simplicity. But it transpires that shipping the Dolly buses to Australia for her upcoming tour will cost $1m each. As Parton has said of herself many times, it costs a lot to look that cheap.
Parton was born and raised in the Smokey Mountains in Tennessee, the fourth of 11 surviving children. Her father, a sharecropper, couldn't afford to pay the doctor who delivered her and so gave him a sack of cornmeal, leading to Parton's oft-repeated joke about how she's been "making dough ever since". She began singing on the radio as a child and went to Nashville to start recording and singing songs as soon as she graduated from high school.
"Back in those days people said it was hard for women to get into the business but I always felt being a woman served me well. I had all these brothers and uncles so I understood the nature of men and I didn't go in there feeling all intimidated. I just went in there and said: 'Hey! I have a good product here and we can all make some money here if y'all wanna get involved with it”.
I think songs like Together You and I, and Just Leaving are really strong Parton cuts and there is plenty of gold to be mined across Better Day! It is an album I have been listening to a bit as, because of its optimism and desire to cheer, there is a lot to recommend. In their review of the album, Popmatters had this to offer:
“Musically, the album is more reminiscent of the pop sheen of her '80s albums crossed with the earnestness of her late '90s/early '00s bluegrass albums. The specificity and spunk of her last album, 2008's Backwoods Barbie, have been more or less forsaken for an attempt at intimacy, where the songs all resemble messages between people, whether it's from one lover to another, from one person to their god or from Dolly Parton to all of humankind. Often, a song could be all of these. They seldom seem to be about one specific person or set of events; they’re more purposefully generic, designed to resonate with the most people at once. Think of this as Dolly’s Life Lessons.
The exceptions, in the general vs. specific balance, are the jokey “Country Is As Country Does”, where Parton (assisted by Mac Davis, in the album’s lone co-write) maintains that she’s inherently country, even when doing rich-people things like eating sushi in a mansion, and “Get Out and Stay Out”, the most devastating of the love songs. It’s devastating because it’s a tale of how love can turn into abuse, and because she sings it delicately, to reveal her character’s frailty, which is more powerful since the song becomes a forceful kiss-off and statement of self-determination. By the end, she’s built up to a fervor, one filled with joy at the expression of independence. On “I Just Might”, she sounds even more fragile, lost; again building with determination -- “I just might make it work / I just might make it after all” – though there’s uncertainty in that “just might” phrase.
These songs leave room for weakness, even as Parton often resembles a motivational speaker. “Shine Like the Sun” captures her essential message well: Don’t give up, we all hurt, but we all can heal and move forward, can always improve. Life is filled with lies and tears, but we should always keep pushing ahead. The same message is turned outward in “Let Love Grow”: Take a chance, be good to people, and great things can happen. “Hindsight’s always out to blind you / Look ahead and not behind you.” The song turns into a joyous singalong: “If I could, I’d ease your doubts for good,” she sings, always the maternal figure, watching out for us all”.
There are constructive points in that review but, to me, I think Better Day has very few flaws and (the album) hits all the right notes! I think Parton’s previous album, Backwoods Barbie, of 2008 was another strong album that deserved more acclaim – I think she was in fine form through these years. In a more positive review, AllMusic remarked the following:
“As she cruises into her mid-sixties, it’s comforting to know that Dolly Parton has lost none of her joy and vitality, and her 41st studio album, Better Day, released on her own Dolly Records imprint, is an energetic, spirited, and hopeful outing that rocks and soars with enough musical sunshine to light up even the grayest day. It simply crackles with joy and hope, and where in lesser hands such boundless good will might seem artificially forced and naïve, Parton pulls it off because, well, she’s Dolly Parton. Lost sometimes in her status as a pop and country icon is the fact that Parton has always written good songs, and she penned all 12 here, and her longtime guitar player Kent Wells, who produced things, has given her a big and bright contemporary country sound that should garner her a good deal of radio time in a fair and equitable world. There are several gems here, including the rocking and soaring opener, “In the Meantime,” the simply lovely “Somebody’s Missing You,” which features background vocals from Emmylou Harris and Alison Krauss, and the clever title tune, “Better Day,” which starts off with a spoken intro from Parton before morphing into a blues, and it is easily the most positive and hopeful blues song anyone is ever likely to hear. Parton has stated that there’s enough trouble and bad news in the world these days and that she wanted to record the brightest and most hopeful album she could make, and she’s done that. Better Day has the feel and tone of gospel, the rock and punch of contemporary country-pop, and it stays steadfast in its mission to add something positive to the world. She may be a senior citizen as far as the IRS is concerned, but Parton has never sounded fresher or more spirited, and with “Somebody’s Missing You” in particular, she shows she still knows how to write a timeless song”.
Go and spin Better Day if you can, as it is an album that ranks alongside the best of Parton’s more recent albums – if we look at how many albums she had put out! -; one that has some brilliant music and some incredible performances. This year has seen some positive and fun albums come out, but I feel there is a lot of anxiety and sadness right now. For that reason, an album like Dolly Parton’s Better Day…
MEANS quite a lot right now.