The one album Dolly Parton was “scared to death” of
There aren’t too many artists who epitomise a ray of sunshine quite like Dolly Parton.
She might not have prided herself on being the most inventive songwriter in the world, but what she brought to country music opened people’s eyes to what an independent woman could do on the charts. There’s a certain innocence when looking back on a lot of her greatest works, but there were moments where even she could get more than a little bit overwhelmed when listening to her favourite artists.
Then again, country music isn’t exactly for the faint of heart, either. Many people like to paint the picture of the genre as a bunch of guys in cowboy hats singing about drinking beer and driving their truck, but if you look back at the genre’s roots, that’s not what it was about at all. There were songs that could garner some real heartache out of people, and the best in their field knew how to take hold of their audience’s nerves and not let go until the song was over.
Even someone not remotely familiar with country music could feel that kind of empathy, too. You didn’t need to understand the history of George Jones to understand ‘He Stopped Loving Her Today’, nor did you have to go through all the emotional experience to relate to Tammy Wynette singing ‘Stand By Your Man’, Johnny Cash talking about prisoners in ‘Folsom Prison Blues’, or even Parton herself singing about a cheating husband on ‘Jolene’.
But even for all the heartache that rock and roll could deliver, the biggest names in rock and roll could tug on the same heartstrings. The age of the singer-songwriter was always a bit of a halfway house between country, folk, and soft rock and roll, but whereas artists like James Taylor and Cat Stevens were offering up slice-of-life songs about the kind of problems that everyone wonders about at some point in their lives, Joni Mitchell had a much different agenda.
She wanted to paint pictures in every song she sang, but whereas albums like Court and Spark and The Hissing of Summer Lawns were fantastic, Parton was nowhere near strong enough to write about heartache in the same way that Mitchell did on Blue, with the folk-rock icon remembering, “[Dolly] said to me quite shyly after the record was played back, ‘My God, if I thought that deep, I’d scare myself to death.’”
That sounds a bit dramatic on paper, but that’s only if you haven’t listened to what Mitchell went through to make the record. She was willing to lay herself bare in every single way, and while you don’t walk away with the highest opinion of anyone in the relationship, it’s much easier to relate to someone who had found themselves emotionally devastated after losing one of the most important relationships in her life.
It can be more than a little bit too intimate, but that’s not necessarily a drawback for Mitchell. All of her songs before and after this album had been incredibly detailed when painting character portraits, and while this one just so happened to be autobiographical, Mitchell wasn’t going to shoot herself in the foot and leave out a few of the details to protect herself from hurting too much.
Parton didn’t want to think in that way whenever she made her records, but the reason why Mitchell’s version works so well is because the audience is hearing someone with no veil on during any of their songs. It’s a very emotional experience trying to even make it through the record, but when anyone cuts ties with their significant other, those emotions demand to be felt.
