IT’S a mark of how utterly game for a laugh Dolly Parton is that her live show extended her country/bluegrass/pop forte into R&B.
Beyonce needn’t be troubled, though. In her tribute to Queen Latifah, Dolly’s co-star in the forthcoming choral comedy film Joyful Noise, the country doyenne rapped (yes, rapped): “Now I don’t hip and I don’t hop/I’d black both eyes with this big top.”
A “joyful noise” is a pretty apt summation of any Dolly gathering. Saturday night’s, the first after a three-week break following her string of North American dates, moved on from her last UK appearance in 2008 with Backwoods Barbie in two ways.
There was the same bittersweet nostalgia of growing up dirt poor in a Tennessee cabin that inspired Coat of Many Colours. There was the same musicianship; those fearsome red talons tackling diamante-spangled guitar on Jolene, banjo on Rocky Top, saxophone on Son of a Preacher Man, piano on Better Day and flute on Smoky Mountain Memories to name but a few.
Yet her choreography was notched up a level from her last visit. Perhaps that 65th candle adorning her cake in January lit a fire. She was clad in an iridescent shorts combo, energetically shaking her rhinestone-encrusted tail feathers for Tina Turner’s River Deep Mountain High, and was shimmying around the SECC stage in four-inch platforms to anthems 9 To 5, Here You Come Again and Islands In The Stream, those sweeter-than-candy-apple lilting vocals belted out truer than ever despite the exertion.
Secondly, new and unashamedly positive material from her 41st album Better Day -- which isn’t released for another seven days -- was like an aural mood elevator, for anyone who takes their music sugar-coated, of course. The anti-apocalyptic In The Meantime, latest single Together You and I and frothy self-portrait Country Is As Country Does were catchy as wildfire.
Her seven-piece band and three backing singers who accompanied covers of Katrina and the Waves’ Walking on Sunshine, the Beatles’ Help and Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven were rendered redundant during openings of the soulful, near-hymnal a capella of Precious Memories and Little Sparrow.
Two and a quarter hours in Dollywood ended with I Will Always Love You and the knowledge that her literacy project Imagination Library, which has gifted more than 40 million books to pre-schoolers, will be delivered in Scotland soon.
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