The 1973 album Dolly Parton that needed to be made: “It was personal”
In 1973, Dolly Parton released ‘Jolene’; it’s no exaggeration to say that the cultural landscape shifted around the song that would cement Parton as a forever star and draw millions of people into her orbit.
Though the hit song hyper-focusses on a souring relationship, in 1973 Parton really spent the year navigating her own relationship with herself, and her past, struggling to glue her thoughts on where she had come from and where she wanted to go together.
My Tennessee Mountain Home, her 1973 release, was an intense album, one of the first projects that she ever sat down and “tailor-made”. She told Pitchfork that she fought with her team to make the project happen, telling them, “I really needed to do this [album]. Right now, I’m beginning to be everything that I dreamed of being.”
Parton continued, “And it was those dreams back there on that little porch of that little cabin, with that tobacco stick, and that crack in the floor, and a tin can for a microphone, that I dreamed of all this.”
In this way, the album was her most introspective to date: “I really thought that it was personal, and it was needed, and it was a theme, and I was happy to do it. It’s like a TV show that has different stories each week, so each song kind of leads you through my childhood, and so I’m as proud of that as anything I’ve ever done.”
Let’s not just take Parton’s word for it; on the titular song, ‘My Tennessee Mountain Home’, such thematic considerations come to the forefront. For example, in the middle of the song, Parton delivers her saccharine lyricism, taking us back to the endless summer days she spent dreaming of something better on the porch: “Honeysuckle vine clings to the fence along the lane, their fragrance makes the summer wind so sweet.”
Pulling us out of the immediacy of the household, Parton looks beyond the land which belongs to her family and notes otherwise, “On a distant hilltop, an eagle spreads its wings, and a songbird on a fence post sings a melody.”
Here, we have an idea of Parton before, and the showbiz Parton after the fame sit in a sweet relation: an eagle, symbol of freedom in America, and the twittering songbird, like the image of the singer-songwriter scribbling words in a notebook, meld together in one joyous vision. She can be big and small, Parton reminds herself: Glitz and glamour and gardening garbs. Eagle and songbird.
Elsewhere in the song, she wrote about “Mama’s old kettle and Daddy’s working boots and all the things that I remember growing up,” which gave fans insight into the heart and soul of the country singer’s music that was so universally cherished.
Perhaps My Tennessee Mountain Home was the first stepping-stone, the first show-it-all moment, that eventually led Parton to where she is now; recently, the star stormed the competition in a US favourability poll of global leaders, significantly beating Barack Obama and Volodymyr Zelensky. Why am I not surprised?
