Coat of Many Colors

Parton, Dolly

album cover

Pure Country Parton

With "Coat of Many Colors," an autobiographical recollection of her hardscrabble girlhood, Dolly Parton made a huge leap. She'd been well known for years, as the duet partner of hit-maker Porter Wagoner. But this song—and really the entire album—cast her in a different light: It revealed the bubbly entertainer as a sharpeyed country auteur, a gifted storyteller who, without dropping a beat, could set a vivid scene, quote relevant Scripture, and gossip a little bit, too.

Parton was the fourth of twelve children born in a one-room cabin in the east Tennessee foothills. When she was young, her mother sewed her a coat made from hand-me-down rags. She wore it to school, and as she recalls in the song, the kids made fun of her. Yet she never stopped being proud of her mother's resourcefulness: "I know we had no money, but I was as rich as I could be/ In my coat of many colors my mama made for me."

The song became Parton's signature. It reached the Top 10 on the country charts in 1971, and it paved the way for a series of pure country albums that are all worth hearing, especially when compared with the high-gloss country-pop crossover Parton pursued later in the '70s. The stylistic range is itself impressive: "Traveling Man," a steamy account of a young girl's flirtations with an older man, chugs along like a ripping Texas-roadhouse rocker, while "She Never Met a Man (She Didn't Like)" is a weepy hymnlike ballad. Parton wrote seven of the songs (Wagoner the other three), and though subsequent records yielded bigger hits (Jolene, from 1974), none quite match the poignant stories and fervent feeling Parton put into Coat.

Genre: Country
Released: 1971, RCA
Key Tracks: "Coat of Many Colors," "Traveling Man."
Catalog Choice: Jolene.
Next Stop: Emmylou Harris: Luxury Liner.
Book Page: 583

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