It’s a great record, hardscrabble and honest and charming; Dolly Parton was just coming into her own as a writer and solo performer. All the tropes we now associate with country music—the idea that the genre boils down to “three chords and the truth,” as the songwriter Harlan Howard once put it—were beginning to crystallize. Parton was such a crucial engineer. Her writing contained enormous warmth and tenderness; unlike some of her erstwhile male colleagues, she possessed an almost uncanny capacity for empathy.
~ Amanda Petrusich via The New Yorker

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