This is almost too much to bear. This sprawling 37-track collection begins with the sainted 78-year-old Dolly Parton providing a jaunty spoken narration of her family’s history in music and the church. It’s old-school Disney documentary in tone, but because it’s Dolly you listen, and with her endless countrified charm she tells a story of generations of banjo players and preachers of the Appalachians – and reminds us that these, her forebears, were immigrants.
She doesn’t use the word, but just how she talks about the landscapes reminding them of home in England and Wales – in a time when America is riven with division – hits hard. Parton, of course, has always exemplified all that’s best about hillbilly culture – and this album is clearly an attempt to demonstrated that it is, or can be, a culture of love. Recording with siblings and cousins, duetting with her own late mother, and interspersing with older recordings still of her family, she’s gone all-out to represent unbroken lines of connection through the folk and bluegrass of her parents and grandparents going forward into the modern rock-inflected country that still dominates American culture, and back through the centuries to the old countries.
It’s sentimental as hell. I mean, it’s country, of course it is. And if you’ve got an aversion to country twang, this is unlikely to be the record to convert you: although there’s plenty of old-style, intimate recording in the first section of the album, it quickly takes a turn for the modern – and the glossy radio production is an acquired taste to say the least. But if you’re willing to sit with it, you might just find yourself falling for those latter section, as you realise how the musical tendrils and lyrical themes of love, loss, loyalty, religion, duty and hard labour expand out of the older styles into the new. And hard though it is to think of heartland America in those terms right now, it’s a stark reminder of what could be: maybe even a source of forlorn hope that a better narrative than the Vice President Elect's hateful Hillbilly Elegy is possible.
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