Discover a World of Sounds

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the early 1980’s, Dolly Parton was a massive superstar speeding through the pop culture cosmos at a frantic pace. She became an actress, cut a number of award-winning albums, graced major magazine covers, and peddled her image on talk shows around the world. She made boob jokes all the rage and dominated the airwaves in multiple radio formats. Her talent was a force to be reckoned with.

 

I’ve avoided shows with narration for several months now because I’m admittedly annoyed by the sound of my own voice. When telling friends this, the common response has been, “Who likes the way they sound?” Well I’m not entirely sure since I don’t know a ton of people that sit at home in front of a microphone and record their own voice. But instead of giving in to feelings of inadequacy, and because I sometimes get bored with making just simple mixes, I decided to produce another Dolly Parton music retrospective.

 

Continuing to explore Dolly’s musical evolution past her crossover success was a pretty fun and intensive task. Although it consists of just five years, it’s a lot of creative ground to cover. While the previous show’s (Crossover – The Sounds of Dolly Parton 1977-1980) intention was to showcase mostly unheard Dolly songs, Superstar doesn’t skirt around Dolly’s major pop hits because those are the songs that really helped define her image. 1980-1985 were Dolly’s final years at RCA Records and her most commercially successful.

I came at the show like an aural Behind The Music and I tried my best, with my limited resources, to give the show an epic quality. It is, of course, epic in size. The show runs 82-minutes so if you download it, be fully ready to get schooled in all things Dolly. The show pulls from multiple media sources that include vinyl, cassette, mp3, quicktime files, compact disc, and even 8-track. Many of the show’s interview clips come from Dolly’s audiocassette edition of her autobiography, My Life and Other Unfinished Business.

The video clip below is Dolly performing “Do I Ever Cross Your Mind” in 1983 at the Dominion Theatre in London. It’s a large file so it might take a while to stream though it’s worth the wait just to see her perform a quick verse of the song in 78 speed.