Let me take you back to the late eighties. It’s somewhere on the south coast of England and the record label CBS are holding their quarterly sales and marketing conference. This is not the big wakoo they hold annually every September to set up for the all important final quarter. It is a spring event with less hoopla than the autumn version and the sales and marketing guys (and believe me it’s 90% guys) get to let off a little steam combined with getting their colleagues excited about the records coming through in the next few months.
For some reason a couple of us have been invited to share the event and this has the unfortunate outcome of letting the artists witness how their work is being handled by the label. Perhaps we were naive, and perhaps we just had never enquired enough but somehow the Mark Twain adage that “Those that respect the law and love sausage should watch neither being made,” now seems very apt. As each marketing manager brought their products up to the gathered workforce the need to surpass the impact of the previous presentation increased. So it was that one unfortunate staffer found himself with the task of introducing the new album by one of the greatest artists his label had ever been lucky enough to call one of their own. The presentation was mainly visual and centred around the size of Dolly Parton’s breast size with accompanying visuals bringing cheers and hollers from the assembled rabble. For us , it was too much. We had been sitting in the front row in lieu of our own record being presented and we made no small fuss of leaving our seats and walking out of the event.
Now it was bad enough watching how a fellow artists record had been diminished but given we were fans of Dolly Parton and believed her to be up there with Springsteen, Dylan, George Michael and all the other flagship acts on the label, it was galling to see how disrespectful this was.
The trouble then, as it has often been in this country’s media, that Dolly Parton has never been taken seriously enough. It’s almost impossible to list the number of ways she has changed the face of popular music but let me at least point to a few: She wrote her own songs when 99% of country hits were written by outside writers, she walked out of a successful TV partnership because she knew she wanted to speak for her self, she has had success over six decades in multiple countries and by success…I mean SUCCESS! I could go on.
On this week’s AC we will anticipate Dolly Parton’s 80th Birthday (19th January) by playing cuts from all these decades. Believe me there is so much more could play too but safe to say Dolly is another great Country game changer in this year where we are celebrating all the great country artists who have changed the genre. From five past eight this Tuesday evening join me for this special show on BBC Sounds or BBC Radio Scotland .