Post by erik on Jan 13, 2024 19:08:23 GMT -5
Dolly Parton will mark her 78th birthday on January 18th, so it only seems fitting to look at what is arguably the most important album of her career, one where she collaborated with two of her closest "gal pals" on a project that totally upended the trajectory of country music in the late 1980's.
TRIO (Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt, and Emmylou Harris; Warner Brothers; 1987)
One of the great pop/country crossover success stories of all time began very innocuously in Nashville in February 1971, when Dolly Parton, then still tied to country legend Porter Wagoner but beginning to have success on her own, met a West Coast hippie named Linda Ronstadt when Linda made her fourth and final appearance on Johnny Cash’s TV show. Two years later, through the auspices of the doomed Gram Parsons, Linda met and instantly befriended Emmylou Harris while she was Neil Young’s opening act, and Emmylou was working with Gram. Then the three of them got together at Emmylou’s home in the hills above Hollywood in the fall of 1975, and got together for some old-time country harmony singing, which the three of them engaged in on Dolly’s syndicated TV show the following spring. The three women, who were by this time virtual household names in music, vowed to get into a studio and put their musical harmony friendship on vinyl and tape. But because of how hot each one was, talking about it and actually doing it proved to be a bridge too far for another eleven years.
And then finally, in the late winter of 1987, the three legendary ladies of country, pop, and rock finally unleashed the album that they simply called Trio. It was an album that seemingly nobody expected, an album of ultra-traditional country music with instrumentation that was rarely heard anymore outside of the Appalachia that Dolly herself was a child of, including dulcimers and autoharps. In fact, according to their chosen producer George Massenburg, the album hit the Nashville establishment, so ensconced still in their pop/country crossover thing, like a bomb, especially because it was recorded in Los Angeles, well outside the purview of the Nashville power structure. It then promptly sold in excess of two and a half million copies.
Besides being a totally out-of-left-field get-together of three of the most important women in American music during the past twenty years, Trio, which not only hit #1 on the C&W Album Chart but also charted at #6 on Billboard’s overall Top 200 Album Chart, can be said to have laid the groundwork for the explosion of female artists that occurred in Nashville during the 1990’s. With Emmylou in the lead, their version of the 1958 Teddy Bears hit “To Know Him Is To Love Him” (originally written and produced by the off-kilter legend Phil Spector) got to #1 on the country singles chart in May 1987. “Telling Me Lies”, written by Betsy Cook and British singer/songwriter Linda Thompson, got to #3 (with Linda Ronstadt on lead vocals); “Those Memories Of You”, with Dolly in the lead, hit #5; and “Wildflowers”, another one with Dolly on lead vocals, got up to #6 in March 1988. The album ended up winning a Grammy for Best Country Vocal Duo/Group performance, as well as honors from the country music industry itself (Album Of The Year from the West Coast-based Academy of Country Music; Vocal Event of the Year from the Country Music Association in Nashville).
Getting a second Trio album, however, proved to be as hard as pulling teeth; and that album didn’t come out until March 1999, due to a very contentious dispute over scheduling between both Dolly and Linda. Trio II, while it didn’t do as well commercially as its predecessor, nevertheless did well enough for itself, and further burnished the reputations of all three women. But a third collaboration would prove to be impossible when, in August 2013, Linda came out with the horrific diagnosis that her four-octave singing voice had been irreparably damaged by what she thought was Parkinson’s, but was re-diagnosed in 2019 as the more insidious Progressive Supranuclear Palsy.
TRIO (Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt, and Emmylou Harris; Warner Brothers; 1987)
One of the great pop/country crossover success stories of all time began very innocuously in Nashville in February 1971, when Dolly Parton, then still tied to country legend Porter Wagoner but beginning to have success on her own, met a West Coast hippie named Linda Ronstadt when Linda made her fourth and final appearance on Johnny Cash’s TV show. Two years later, through the auspices of the doomed Gram Parsons, Linda met and instantly befriended Emmylou Harris while she was Neil Young’s opening act, and Emmylou was working with Gram. Then the three of them got together at Emmylou’s home in the hills above Hollywood in the fall of 1975, and got together for some old-time country harmony singing, which the three of them engaged in on Dolly’s syndicated TV show the following spring. The three women, who were by this time virtual household names in music, vowed to get into a studio and put their musical harmony friendship on vinyl and tape. But because of how hot each one was, talking about it and actually doing it proved to be a bridge too far for another eleven years.
And then finally, in the late winter of 1987, the three legendary ladies of country, pop, and rock finally unleashed the album that they simply called Trio. It was an album that seemingly nobody expected, an album of ultra-traditional country music with instrumentation that was rarely heard anymore outside of the Appalachia that Dolly herself was a child of, including dulcimers and autoharps. In fact, according to their chosen producer George Massenburg, the album hit the Nashville establishment, so ensconced still in their pop/country crossover thing, like a bomb, especially because it was recorded in Los Angeles, well outside the purview of the Nashville power structure. It then promptly sold in excess of two and a half million copies.
Besides being a totally out-of-left-field get-together of three of the most important women in American music during the past twenty years, Trio, which not only hit #1 on the C&W Album Chart but also charted at #6 on Billboard’s overall Top 200 Album Chart, can be said to have laid the groundwork for the explosion of female artists that occurred in Nashville during the 1990’s. With Emmylou in the lead, their version of the 1958 Teddy Bears hit “To Know Him Is To Love Him” (originally written and produced by the off-kilter legend Phil Spector) got to #1 on the country singles chart in May 1987. “Telling Me Lies”, written by Betsy Cook and British singer/songwriter Linda Thompson, got to #3 (with Linda Ronstadt on lead vocals); “Those Memories Of You”, with Dolly in the lead, hit #5; and “Wildflowers”, another one with Dolly on lead vocals, got up to #6 in March 1988. The album ended up winning a Grammy for Best Country Vocal Duo/Group performance, as well as honors from the country music industry itself (Album Of The Year from the West Coast-based Academy of Country Music; Vocal Event of the Year from the Country Music Association in Nashville).
Getting a second Trio album, however, proved to be as hard as pulling teeth; and that album didn’t come out until March 1999, due to a very contentious dispute over scheduling between both Dolly and Linda. Trio II, while it didn’t do as well commercially as its predecessor, nevertheless did well enough for itself, and further burnished the reputations of all three women. But a third collaboration would prove to be impossible when, in August 2013, Linda came out with the horrific diagnosis that her four-octave singing voice had been irreparably damaged by what she thought was Parkinson’s, but was re-diagnosed in 2019 as the more insidious Progressive Supranuclear Palsy.