Dolly Parton Coming Out

Album review: Dolly Parton, Better Day

Yet even at her most cartoonish, Parton will not be too easily pigeonholed, delivering the mischievous parting shot "but that don't mean I can't go to town". That's the self-perpetuating survival mentality behind the cleverly constructed and assiduously maintained Dolly brand. She can give you what you want but still do her own thing. If her previous studio album Backwoods Barbie was a kitsch dollop of Dollyworld, Better Day is at least intended to offer more of a worldview. Naturally, what it offers is a Dollyworldview, with Parton ticking off her favourite well-worn themes – that she's a simple girl living a simple life (sequins and surgery notwithstanding), that you should be thankful for what you've got, and that love hurts but you've got to keep your chin up. Her sunny, carefree disposition is showcased right from the off on In The Meantime, a rollicking honky tonk number in the vein of Better Get To Livin', about enjoying what you have, which waves a finger in the nicest possible way at the apocalyptic doom- mongers, advocating instead a no- nonsense biblical attitude to the end of time: "Let us not fear which is not clear... we're so consumed with the fear of dying, the love of living is lost". Better Day is rarely that incisive again. The Sacrifice pays tribute to the virtue and benefits of hard work and determination – which in Dollyworld can be summed up pithily as "grindstones and rhinestones". Although she does cannily expose a chink in her rhinestone armour at the end of the song, Parton is so practised at delivering this sort of homespun message that it comes over like a missive from the Dolly corporation rather than a cry from the heart. When she does turn to matters of the heart, it is with mixed fortunes. Lead single Together You And I was originally recorded for an album of duets with her mentor Porter Wagoner in 1974.

Love And Marriage Come First For Dolly Parton | Celebs Senior ...

  Dolly says that although the couple are rarely seen in public together that Carl is the most important person in her life.

Added Dolly: “Carl’s never wanted to be in the limelight, so I didn’t put him there. He wants to be left alone and be a homebody and then hear about what I’ve been up to when I get back. He’s my anchor and I’m his excitement.”

Carl and Dolly met in Nashville in 1966 and he accepts that her phenomenally successful career has resulted in her missing out on time with her spouse and her family.

Dolly who never had children with Carl – said : “(For success) I gave up time with family and friends, I can’t ever plan too far ahead. I didn’t have children.