Of course Dolly Parton is a sentimentalist: The whole point of her work is to get across what it's like to feel things incredibly strongly and without reservation. She makes Andrew W.K. sound like Grace Jones. When she's happy or nostalgic, which she is a lot of the time (dirt-poor but happy childhoods! loving families! SUNSHINE!), the result is usually kitsch: Music that spells out how and why her audience is supposed to feel happy or nostalgic too. When she's feeling something darker or more complicated, though, the same technique is a lot more impressive.
For instance: "Jolene", the title track of the 1974 album that's one of three new Dolly reissues from a four-year stretch in which she released 15 albums (many of the others were duet records with Porter Wagoner). It's spent a few decades as The Country Song People Who Don't Like Country Like, because it's a gut-punch of a song and a performance, and it's been covered by everyone from Strawberry Switchblade to the White Stripes. The character Dolly's playing is totally screwed: The bitch she's flattering with gentility has already ruined her life, and both of them know it. And it's a song about class, which she gets across with nothing more than a few details of her vocal. Observe the way she sings "he talks about you in his sleep": The twist of the vowels and the slur on the S's communicate with perfect economy that she's, as they say, non-U, as much as she's resorting to fancy diction ("iv'ry skin and eyes of emerald green") to make a good impression.
Jolene also has the problem that plagues a lot of Dolly's catalogue, which is that there's an enormous gulf between its two astonishing singles and the gormless Nashville-by-numbers filler that pads it out. (The bonus tracks, as with the other two reissues, fall on the filler side.) The other astonishing one is "I Will Always Love You"-- yes yes, Whitney, whatever: If that spoken verse doesn't destroy you, you do not have a functional heart. And even here, money sneaks in: a few years earlier, she'd co-written a song called "I'll Oilwells Love You".
There are certain things that sentimentalism as a guiding philosophy makes a lot worse, though, like the bulk of 1973's My Tennessee Mountain Home, a concept album about Dolly leaving her loving family to head to the big city in search of a Nashville recording contract. It opens with her reading what purports to be her first letter home, backed by a lone, echoing harmonica playing "Home, Sweet Home", and she's not kidding. Not even a little bit. The next song contains the line "I remember gingerbread that Mama used to bake." The one after that is called "Old Black Kettle", followed by "Daddy's Working Boots", and so on.
The suffocating floral-sachet smell is only cleared away twice: A convincing flash of memory in the middle of "Down on Music Row" ("on the steps of RCA I ate a stale sweet roll"), and a remake of her 1969 song "In the Good Old Days (When Times Were Bad)", in which she stops romanticizing Daddy's cracked, bleeding hands, notes that Mama couldn't actually afford the house-call-makin' doctor she'd paid homage to in the previous track, and declares that "no amount of money could pay me to go back and live through it again." Not "nothing," but "no amount of money": Again, it comes down to nickels and dimes.
So does the heartstring-tugging but quietly enraged title track of 1971's Coat of Many Colors: "one is only poor only if they choose to be," Dolly sings (pronouncing "choose" as "choosh"), and you'd better believe every "error" in that line is deliberate. It's one of her most consistent early records, meaning that she makes it two-thirds of the way through before she hits a pedestrian song, and all the way to the last song before she hits an embarrassing one. The other singles are both pretty sharp-- the beloved Mama in "Traveling Man" absconds with the narrator's boyfriend, and "My Blue Tears" is airy bluegrass that's mostly a showcase for Dolly's effortless, fluttering phrasing. And, mercifully, the filler lets her stretch out a little. Bonus points for the Wagoner-written "If I Lose My Mind", whose narrator runs back home to Mama after her boyfriend "made me watch him love another woman/And tried to make me love another man." Extra bonus points for "She Never Met a Man (She Didn't Like)", which starts out with the same passive-aggressive flinch as "Jolene" and gradually turns venomous-- for once, she sounds like she's in on the joke.
