The forgotten 1969 track Dolly Parton will never forget: “Favourite song of mine”
There’s no sense in trying to stop Dolly Parton whenever she starts writing a new tune.
She was a machine when it came to cranking out some of the greatest country songs of all time, and given her track record, it’s hard to think of someone who has created so many timeless melodies and has all of them be absolutely brilliant the way that she has done over the years. She has made the greatest tales of heartache sound effortless, but that doesn’t mean that all of her musical children get the same treatment every single time she plays.
Granted, if all of those songs did get the same treatment, we would still be listening to all of them to this day. Compared to everyone else in the country community, having 49 albums isn’t the easiest to keep up with. Sure, they’re broken up over half a century of making music, but when looking at her entire discography, it’s easy to pick out the highlights and then choose where you want to go from there.
Coat of Many Colors and Jolene are pretty much mandatory listening for even passive country fans, but Parton didn’t hold it against the audience if one of her albums underperformed. She knew that she wasn’t perfect and could write a few clunkers in her discography every now and again, but that also means that some of the biggest songs in her heart tend to fall by the wayside every now and again.
I guess it’s a good problem to have, but while Paul McCartney will always have songs like ‘Waterfalls’ and David Bowie will have ‘Time’ as songs that fell through the cracks, Parton figured that ‘Down From Dover’ was the kind of tune that deserved a much better fate than it received when she first cut the song in 1969. Because if there’s one thing that the tune proved, it was that she was a master storyteller.
All good country songs back in the day prided themselves on telling stories of heartache and love lost, and Parton has the perfect voice to sell those kinds of songs. And in the case of ‘Down From Dover’, you can almost feel the heartache on her behalf every time she talks about her man coming back home from work in another state. There’s no telling whether he’s coming back or not, but all you can do is hope right along with Parton as she waits by the door to see if he comes back.
There’s not a ton to unpack with this kind of song, but the simplicity of it was what made Parton fall in love with the tune when she first wrote it, saying, “You hope that songs like that are hits. ‘Jolene’, songs like that, you write them, and you don’t know. You have no way of knowing. And then there are songs that you love that you think could be hits, like a favourite song of mine from an album is a song called ‘Down From Dover’. And it’s like – it’s a song that people have heard if they’re big fans.”
Granted, ‘Jolene’ was a damn wrecking ball when it came out, and since Parton was still working with Porter Wagoner around this time, there’s a good chance that the tune needed a few more years to be truly appreciated. And while her re-recorded version of the tune in the 2000s did put a little bit of shine on it, her voice seemed to inhabit the song a lot better. She had grown older, and her voice almost sounded like she had been waiting for years for her other half to come home.
Sure, people might be looking for Parton to play the hits whenever she plays one of her concerts, but it’s ‘Down From Dover’ that keeps her wanting to make more albums. Because no matter how many times people might scream for ‘I Will Always Love You’ and ‘9 to 5’, there’s no telling whether or not she has a song that sounds this good in her back pocket on any one of her records.
