Dolly Parton Album: “The Essential Dolly Parton (Legacy)”

Being released on the newly formed Legacy/BMG merged label, one would think Legacy would try to feature more songs from their vaults and tracks recorded from her brief stint with UMG. While the mastering of this cd with her over compiled recordings from RCA sound the best ever, I really feel Legacy missed out on a golden opportunity. While "Shine" closes out this set, the bluegrass album that preceeded it, "The Grass Is Blue," isn't represented at all, as isn't "Halos and Horns." Dolly's one off album with MCA/Decca "Hungry Again" could have be represented by "Paradise Road," and "Treasures" could have been represented by it's huge hit "Peace Train," which was subject to a number of remixes for club consumption. The Sony label could have been better highlighted with hits like "Romeo" and the gospel anthem "He's Alive." I think now we must move past compilations and focus on re-issues. A lot of Dolly's albums, there are a lot of them, have been langushing in the vaults for years; dust 'em off already.

In the mid-90s, RCA finally began treating the back catalogs of its legendary artist with respect, with their Essential series, which included two volumes focusing on Dolly Parton's work during her 19-year stint with the label.

This new two-disc Essential collection from Sony BMG replaces the earlier RCA volumes. When RCA's parent company BMG merged with Sony, and the bulk of Dolly's catalog was controlled by one company, many fans, myself included, were excited at the prospect of finally getting an anthology that included hits from her Monument days through her 1987-1995 association with Columbia Records. It was inevitable that the RCA material would dominate, given Parton's long association with that label (1967-1986); however it is disappointing that her Columbia work remains under-anthologized. Only two of her Columbia hits - 1989's "Why'd You Come In Here Looking Like That" and her 1991 duet with Ricky Van Shelton, "Rockin' Years" are represented here. At the very least, "Yellow Roses", "He's Alive", "Eagle When She Flies", and "Silver And Gold", deserved inclusion in this collection. Instead, we get a single track from the Trio albums -- "To Know Him Is To Love Him" with Emmylou Harris on lead vocals, and a duet with Porter Wagoner, "Please Don't Stop Loving Me", which, though excellent, probably should have been excluded in favor of some of Dolly's solo work.

On the bright side, this collection does include a pair of brilliant early tracks that failed to catch on commercially at the time. It's nice to see that "My Blue Ridge Mountain Boy" and "Dumb Blonde", her first (modest) hit for Monument Records, each earned a slot here. I'd have preferred more selections from these early years, instead of some of the later crossover hits which are widely available on other collections, but at least this was a step in the right direction.

The remaining tracks on this collection, are by and large, a rehash of the earlier RCA Essential volumes. It's impossible to do justice to such a long and successful career as Dolly Parton's with a two-disc set. It's also impossible to please everyone - I'd have made some different choices if I were the one compiling this collection - but overall, it is a good introduction to Dolly's work and the best retrospective of her career currently available, despite its shortcomings.

Diehard Parton fans might consider purchasing "The Tour Collection", a 4 CD boxed set recently released by Sony BMG in the UK that contains a handful of Dolly's hits, along with a generous sampling of rare tracks, several of which are making their first appearance on CD. There is some duplication with the Essential discs, but the two collections combined will provide a comprehensive look at this amazing singer-songwriter's entire career.

This is probably the most comprehensive collection there is for Dolly Parton's music (unless you can find a copy of the Australian 3 cd import LEGENDARY). With the recent merging of RCA/BMG and Sony/Columbia, I hope that they will be responsible and release her albums that are not yet available on CD. Fans would buy that. Yet RCA is still releasing these collections, year after year. At least this time, it's somewhat complete. It's far from definitive, but it's a good place to start. 37 tracks spread out over 2 discs give a quick overview of her career. Lets hope they do a boxed set or something different than the average compilation with the same tracks on it.

This essential collections has pretty much everything you could want from Dolly all on 2 discs. If you are looking for the complete Dolly collection, then look into the 4 disc box set. This is a great collection regardless with 14 number one hits on here, you really can't miss. Enjoy and Stay 2nd :-)

A career as long and rich as Parton's can't possibly be fully surveyed in only thirty-seven tracks on two discs. But this latest Essential volume does an admirable job of pulling together many of the singer-songwriter's catalog highpoints, mixing her best-loved solo hits with duets from Porter Wagoner, Kenny Rogers and Ricky Van Shelton, her trio work with Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris, and finishing with a track ("Shine") from her trio of recent bluegrass-influenced albums.

The track list here covers much of the same ground as the two volume mid-90s "Essential" set, though notably adding Parton's first charting single, "Dumb Blond," and stretching into Parton's twenty-first century's return to her mountain roots The merger of RCA/BMG and Sony/Columbia opened the doors for the breadth of material pulled together here, but it's simply not enough to fully essay Parton's artistry; the list of missing essentials is as long as the list included here. Further, the space available on each disc suggests a desire to keep the mechanical royalties in line with a list price that's affordable to an audience beyond Parton die-hards.

This set is well positioned to replace the previous two volume series as a value-priced overview/entry-point to Parton's extraordinary catalog. That it repeats much of the same core catalog as earlier compilations is something of an empty complaint, given that it's not intended to probe any deeper. Still, with most of Parton's RCA album catalog out of print, this view of the better-known highlights does re-beg the question of when individual album reissues or a comprehensive box set will be produced for Parton's hardcore fans. [©2005 hyperbolium dot com]