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Legendary singer-songwriter Dolly Parton, who died Tuesday at age 80, performed at Sacramento’s Arco Arena multiple times. Here is some Sacramento Bee coverage of the concerts.
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Dolly Parton’s 2008 show at Arco Arena
The Bee’s Rachel Leibrock interviewed Parton before the show.
With the candy-floss hair and knock-‘em-out curves, Dolly Parton has made a living off her bawdy, larger-than-life image. But the 62-year-old musician is also an unequaled singer-songwriter with a Southern drawl-soaked soprano and a flair for the down-home turn of phrase.
Parton has penned more than two dozen No. 1 hits during her five-decade career; standouts for the 2006 Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts honoree include “Jolene,” “Bargain Store” and “I Will Always Love You.”
The singer, who recently finished writing songs for “9-to-5: The Musical” (based on her 1980 hit film), recently released her latest studio album, “Backwoods Barbie,” a collection of pop-tinged country tunes.
Parton, who is scheduled to perform tonight at Arco Arena, called in from Los Angeles to discuss songwriting, influences and Jessica Simpson.
Q: How’s the tour going?
It’s good. Of course, we always do our old favorites like “Jolene,” “I Will Always Love You,” “Coat of Many Colors” — all the stuff that people expect. But I have a new CD out, and we’ll be doing songs from that, and there’s a gospel medley where we do Neil Diamond’s “Brother Love Salvation Show” and add a bunch of old gospel tunes in it.
Q: Will you preview any of the songs from the “9-to-5” musical?
Yes, in fact “Backwoods Barbie” is a song I actually wrote for that. It’s for the little character Doralee. Megan Hilty is playing my part in the musical, and she performs that particular song when the office workers think she’s all banging the boss and they’re ignoring her and giving her the cold shoulder.
She’s very hurt and just trying to explain herself as to why she is the way she is — just a country girl’s idea of being glam.
Q: How was it writing songs for that musical, revisiting it after all these years?
Great but different. I knew all those characters so well. So when they asked me to write it, I thought, “Well, this should be easy.” I’ve never written a musical, although I had, for years, been piddling around with writing my own life story as a musical. I found that it was much easier writing for the stage than it is trying to write for radio and records because I wasn’t limited by time or (structure). It gave my imagination more freedom.
Q: Do you remember the first song you wrote?
Oh yes, I wrote it before I could write, when I was 5. We used to raise our own corn, so we had lots of cobs lying around, and corn shucks and silk, and Mama used to make toys out of them and Daddy had put some poker-hole eyes in this corn cob and Mama made her a little silk dress. I named her Tassle Top, so that was my first song — “Little Tassle Top.” But when I was 7, I started playing guitar and I started writing some dead-serious songs after that.
Q: What was the point when you realized this wasn’t a hobby but a way of life?
I was 10 when I went to play on the radio for the first time. They had a little audience there and I kept getting encore after encore — of course, I know now it was because I was little, not because I was good — but it gave me confidence, and I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life doing this.
Q: You got your big break on “The Porter Wagoner Show.” What kind of effect did he have, not just on your career, but on your craft?
Porter and I argued a lot and didn’t get along all the time, but he was a real pro. I learned a lot of how not to be, but also how to entertain, how to conduct myself onstage.
Q: What kind of things did you argue about?
Everything! Mostly because I was always independent and wanted to do things my way, and he wanted to do them his way. If I wrote my songs, I wanted them recorded the way I heard them. Porter always wanted to take my songs in private — let me show him all I wanted to do — and then he wanted to present them to the musicians. I’d get so frustrated when he’d miss a lick or he couldn’t hit what I was hitting. I’d want to kill him and I’d finally just say, “Damn it — that’s not the way it goes!” and I’d grab the guitar and play it for the musicians. And of course I’d have hell to pay later.
Q: But you two always made up … ?
Yeah, it was just one of those types of things, like when we’d argue over when I said I’d stay five years with his show and I wound up staying seven because he would just not hear of me leaving. That’s why I wrote the song “I Will Always Love You” — because he wouldn’t listen to me. I wrote it to say, “I appreciate what you’ve done, but if I stay around here, I’m going to be in your way and you’re going to be in mine.”
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Q: You wrote songs for the new Jessica Simpson album. What was that like?
I wrote the title song, which is called “Do You Know?” and I sang a duet with her. I think her album is fantastic.
Q: She’s getting a lot of flak for crossing over from pop to country …
Oh, she gets a lot of flak if she wakes up in the morning, and I don’t understand that. She’s a very sweet, down-to- earth country girl — very much like myself. I’m compassionate toward her, and I think it’s very unfair they give her such a bum rap. I think she sings her ass off, and I tried to sing my ass off with her.
2004 show at Arco Arena
The Bee’s Dixie Reid attended the show.
Why’d you come in here lookin’ like that, when you could stop traffic in a gunnysack? Because you’re Dolly Parton, you wrote these lyrics 15 years ago, and they still apply.
You’re gussied up in a white satin jumpsuit with pedal-pusher legs and dripping in fringe and glitter. You have feathers in your hair. You’re working the room in 4-inch heels. You giggle like Betty Boop and then break hearts with your crystalline voice. You are funny and charming, and shamelessly promote your Dollywood theme park in Tennessee.
“Oh my goodness. Well, anyway,” you say. “It’s so much fun being on the road again.”
Parton, a singing-songwriting country legend, brought her “Hello, I’m Dolly“ tour to Arco Arena on Sunday night, playing to a mostly older crowd of about 6,000. It’s her lengthiest tour in 20 years and, at age 58, fans have to wonder if she’ll ever be by this way again.
Those who turned out for the concert, for which Parton played hostess as much as headliner, were treated to vintage Dolly.
She teased the crowd that she’d be changing costumes in front of them and then slipped in and out of pin-on pigtails (for her cover of Melanie’s “Brand New Key”) and assorted sheer skirts she wrapped around her form-fitting jumpsuit.
She even made jokes about her famous bosom.
“If I pulled a Janet Jackson,” she said, “I’d take out the first two or three rows.”
Parton, always humble and self-effacing, described her look – blond wig, red lips, 2-inch crimson fingernails – as something between “trailer park and Park Avenue.” Then she said, “I like to dress up and be gaudy, but I take my work seriously.”
She has written more than 3,000 songs, many of which hearken back to her Great Smoky Mountains upbringing, as one of 12 children in a poor but loving family. She sang “Coat of Many Colors,” the story of the warm wrap her mother sewed for her from a box of rags, and “Smoky Mountain Memories,” about her father’s longing for home while working in Detroit at a Ford factory.
Promising something for everyone, she covered Kris Kristofferson’s “Me and Bobby McGee” (a hit for Janis Joplin) and John Lennon’s “Imagine.” She climbed on the piano (decked out with a feather boa, a cigarette holder and a very large martini glass) for “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” reprising a recent recorded duet with Rod Stewart (filling in was keyboard player Richard Dennison.)
She brought out a blue guitar for “PMS Blues” and, before the night was over, also had played harmonica, banjo, flute, dulcimer and her fingernails (as accompaniment for “9 to 5,” the 1981 Oscar-nominated title song from her first movie.)
Parton ended her 90-minute set with “I Will Always Love You” and the spiritual, soaring “Hello God.”
She left for the night in a swirl of white, looking more angelic than gaudy.
“How many people get to do what they dream of?” she asked the crowd. “I thank you for it, and I will always love you.”
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