Coat of Many Colors (1971)

7.5

Coat of Many Colors / Traveling Man / My Blue Tears / If I Lose My Mind / The Mystery of the Mystery / She Never Met a Man (She Didn't Like) / Early Morning Breeze / The Way I See You / Here I Am / A Better Place to Live

Breasts. Big ones. Now we have that issue out of the way, let's focus on what's really relevant here: the music. Oh, I know you think this is one of my pranks. I reviewed Slayer, AC/DC Entombed and Napalm Death, right? I must be joking. Well, let me tell you two things: 1) I don't do pranks and 2) I love country. Not the cuntry the Americans out there have to deal with when they turn on the radio, but COUNTRY. Indeed, the "facts-of-life" music is it's commonly known, the folk music about the highs and lows in the lives of hard-working, honest people. Clichéd, but mostly true and Parton's 1971 album Coat of Many Colors is definitely good country. She'd been recording a bunch of music prior to this album - mostly under the guidance Porter Wagoner - but it pretty much stayed under the radar of mainstream success. It takes only two listens to Coat of Many Colors to understand why this one did the job: it incorporates elements from pop (those backing vocals definitely gave it some of a pop sheen), diversifies (the first three songs hop from country-folk balladry to a swift shuffle to a classic example of country heartbreak) and the songs (seven songs written by Parton, three by Wagoner) are pretty strong for the most part. Of course, Parton was a true country artist, which means she wrote from the gut and the simple things in life (love, religion, nature, etc), so you shouldn't expect philosophical treatises and big words, but if you bought this album, you're already supposed to know that. Anyway, the title track is undoubtedly the prize-winner here and arguably the album's only classic track. The country charts have always been saturated with cosy songs about home and the family (check out Cash's Songs of Our Soil with its "Don't Step on Mother's Roses" and "My Grandfather's Clock" - or a compilation by any country legend and you'll find more), but Parton manages to infuse the song with such a poignant meaning as she tells the (autobiographical) story of getting a coat that was made of patches stitched together by her mother, framing it in the biblical story of Joseph. From there onwards, Coat of Many Colors is quite a ride, as it continually seems to switch from more spiritual to more earthy themes: "Traveling Man" (the album's ROCK song) with its cocky vocals is about a girl falling in love with a travelling man and seeing her mother run off with the guy, "My Blue Tears" is a classic heartbreak tune that's followed by "If I Lose My Mind," a song that touches upon partner-swapping, as the girl who flees to her mother's place tells her "he's done things to me I couldn't understand" and "he made me watch him love another woman and he tried to make me love another man" (this album gets a PG-rating)! Of course, Dolly retaliates with Wagoner's ultra-religious, God-fearing waltz "The Mystery of the Mystery," which sets things straight for all the curious sinners out there:

There you go. "She Never Met a Man (She Didn't Like)," another light-paced waltz, is a warning against the whoring behaviour of a bad, bad woman ("You mean no more to her than all the others she's held tight") and "Early Morning Breeze" a meditation on the beauty of the nature God's given us, wrapped up in some of Dolly's most, beautiful and girlishly charming vocals. Wagoner's "The Way I See You" definitely gets the cheese-meter in the red with a slick ballad, but fortunately the pace picks up again for the last two songs: "Here I Am," the album's second best song is a soulful tribute to love with nearly ecstatic vocals (go, Dolly, go!), while "A Better Place to Live" is a call for brotherly love that's undoubtedly well-intended, but also packaged in lines such as: "Wouldn't it be great to live and sing in harmony, everybody take your brother's hand and sing my song with me… LALALALALALALAAA …." Since this is the year 2004, it's hard not to regard this is an album with scepticism - the load of naïve lyrics and messages! -, but its purity (remember: it's not Dolly who was whoring and when her man asked her to join him in the partner-swapping, she ran off to her mother) and straightforward approach to everyday themes is certainly refreshing and - since Buddha re-issued it - available in a crispy sound that's still far removed from the slick pap she'd become famous for a decade later.

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