The Good Old Days (When Times Were Bad) (studio album) by Dolly Parton

From Mercury 10/19/2017 20:19

Dolly Parton is one of the greatest songwriters in country music history. She also has a beautiful, unique and authoritative voice for the ages. This is all on full display in her early classics. She made no bad albums from 68-74 at least. I just can't express I love hearing her brilliant, nuanced wordplay and by turns sassy, vulnerable, and just all around amazing vocal twists of phrase.

On this album she starts out the gate killing with "Don't Let It Trouble Your Mind", followed with an even better and more intensely badass song in "He's a Go Getter" with great lines like "He's a go getter, a goooo getter, when his wife gets off work, he'll go get 'er!". Delivered with a rapturous, musical bliss which I can't get over.

The album keeps on this sharp, beautiful run with the title track which is awesome for its personal lyrics about what it was like growing up in the good old days, when times were bad, working her ass off, making ends meet, etc. This song is full of propulsive rhythmic work, beautiful, full-throated, classic country harmonies.

Somehow the album doesn't let up, cuz the first 7 tracks are all fabulous, liberating statements, excellent portraits of Dolly's life growing up in the south, filled with killer pedal steel work, beautiful music through and through. The song "Harper Valley PTA" is just sick, with its excellent statement of female liberation, and its stuttery swaggering pedal steel lines, its groovy af rhythm. The whole song just kills. And the way the song ends with 2 minutes straight of the main protagonist calling out all the prudish people she works with at a school, its honestly the most badass thing set to record in 1969. Don't qoute me on that as I don't know everything put on wax in '69, but the sentiment is clear.

The album loses a smidgen of steam after the initial explosion, still there is not a bad song here. And the record ends with one of the most poignant divorce drama songs I've heard and all its ramifications for a family with chilluns - the song is called "D-I-V-O-R-C-E" by the way. Check it out as well.

This whole album is a pretty straight forward late 60s country album, with all the common traits shared with other nice records of its ilk turned up extremely high by the great talents of Parton as a star, a singer, and a great great songwriter.

Okay, so I will give this a rating of....

Rating: 8.9/10