Dolly Parton came to Seattle in August and played a great show at a miserable venue--the WaMu Theatre near the Seahawks Stadium and Safeco Field. I started writing about it in August, and just bumped into it again, so I thought I'd finish this now.
Dolly brought along an eight piece band and three back-up singers. The singers were great. The band itself, serviceable. They may have been great (there were no flubs or clams or anything) but they never got much of a chance to stretch out.
Dolly did what is apparently her standard show, just under two hours, with a lot of corny jokes and reminiscences of growing up in a poor family in Smoky Mountain Tennessee. Interestingly, she never mentioned her first big job in the music business, working with Porter Wagner.
Dolly's voice was near-perfect. Unbelievably, heartbreakingly true, and maybe even better than it was on her debut record in the early 70's. When I first heard her sing way back then it was stunning, but thirty-five plus years later, unlike, say Brian Wilson, Joni Mitchell, Mick Jagger, and other 60+ year olds who use back-up singers to hit the high notes, and keep them on pitch, Dolly did the heavy lifting. This was nowhere more apparent than her rendition of "Little Sparrow"
a capella. It was absolutely stunning and spot on, and maybe even better than the version she recorded a few years ago on one of her fairly recent bluegrass albums.
Her eight-piece band took the stage at the stroke of eight and Dolly was singing on her headset mic before some of the crowd was even in their seats. The audience for this stop on the "Backwoods Barbie" tour was not a sell-out, but Parton immediately made those who showed up feel at home.
She performed quite a few covers. The first was a version of John Denver's Thank God I'm A Country Boy. It was OK (better than the original). She also had a hunky roadie or guitar tech in overalls dance a sort of hillbilly shuffle. She named him her "Backwoods Ken." During the show, she also covered Great Balls of Fire (which seemed pointless). Her cover of the Fine Young Cannibals' "She Drives Me Crazy," complete with hoedown, was wonderful, both her arrangement, and the hoedown she interpolated.
All the glitz and cornpone humor didn't distract from the heart and country soul behind her classic tunes like "Coat of Many Colors," "Jolene," "Tennessee Mountain Home" and many others.
During the course of the show she played an a rhinestone-encrusted autoharp (or is it a dulcimer), an acoustic guitar, an electric guitar, the piano, a harmonica, a banjo, and maybe one or two other instruments. It was hard to tell if it was shtick or not. . .but she could play them all. I don't know how she was able to play the harmonica without turning her lipstick into a clown job. Whether it was showmanship or not, it helped break up the show and made each song unique.
She played about half the songs from her current album, "Backwoods Barbie" album, a couple of which I could have lived without.
After a 20-minute intermission, the second set peaked with a remarkable doo-wop arrangement of Parton's "Do I Ever Cross Your Mind," featuring Dolly and the men of her ensemble singing a cappella. They followed that with Parton singing the heartbreaking "Little Sparrow," from her 2001 album, ranging from soft and breathy to a piercing belt and back again in the space of a few seconds. After that, it was time to wrap things up, and Parton served up her broadest pop-oriented megahits (though not necessarily her best tunes), as fans of every age, background and sexual orientation (she draw a large gay and lesbian audience, at least in Seattle), danced, sang along and generally had a blast. Of course, she sang the biggest cash cow from her songbook, "I Will Always Love You."
At just past ten, Parton walked offstage, and returned for a one-song encore.
Parton's chops as a songwriter and singer almost have no peer, but equally remarkable is that larger-than-life personality, in which tackiness and sincerity somehow co-exist in a rhinestone world.
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