The 1970 hit Dolly Parton “one of my favorite songs of all time”
Dolly Parton wasn’t the kind to talk about her credentials in the world of rock and roll.
She was one of the most influential figures in American music, but even if the rock and roll community loved having her around, she was always going to rest on her laurels and make some of the finest country music that anyone had ever heard. But that didn’t mean that Parton didn’t know a great rock and roll tune when she heard one, whenever she listened to the greatest singer-songwriters.
Because when you think about it, singer-songwriters aren’t all that different from what the biggest stars in Nashville were doing. The country capital of the world may have been more interested in making music that sounded like an assembly line of classics half the time, but the greatest songwriters in every genre are going to want to make tunes that touch your heart instead of making the latest catchy tune.
And when you look at those coming out of the woodwork in the 1970s, it’s not like all of them didn’t have a country slant to their sound. Eagles were already being stuck with the country-rock tag whenever they made a new record, and even Linda Ronstadt was getting a lot of flak for becoming one of the queens of country music from all the way in California. But it didn’t matter to Parton so long as they had the songs to back them up.
She had fallen in love with tunes by everyone from Johnny Cash to Tom Petty to Don Henley, but Neil Young almost belonged in a whole separate category. His music was full of grit and swagger before he had even sung anything half the time, but even when he stripped everything down to acoustic music, he could get downright beautiful every single time he played one of his tunes.
But beyond the hits like ‘Heart of Gold’, Parton felt that ‘After the Gold Rush’ was the height of what Young could do. She had thought enough of the track to include it on the record she made with the Trio, but even on a record stacked with some of the best Americana songs of the time, Parton felt that nothing was going to come close to what Young could do on this kind of gripping ballad.
He was telling a story just like the old legends before him, and Parton figured it deserved a place among the finest rock songs ever, saying, “‘After The Gold Rush’ happens to be one of my favorite songs of all time. I loved the song on Neil Young’s album, and I loved it when Prelude had it out in 1974.” And while it stuck out among the other tunes on the record, it didn’t have to be that out of place with the right arrangement.
A lot of what Young was doing was mimicking the kinds of songwriters that he was listening to before, and even if his music was a bit rough around the edges, that only added to the charm. He wasn’t trying to make everything sound too glossy, but that only served to make the song better every single time he sang about the nature of man and how Mother Nature is being affected by humankind every single day.
She may have had her hangups about being considered a rock star, but Parton wasn’t about to be snobby whenever it came to a great song. Getting that kind of tone was all that mattered, and as long as someone had a song in their heart that they were willing to sing for the world, that was more than enough for her to give it the green light.
