The hardest part of being a Dolly Parton fan is navigating her currently available catalog. The state of her RCA releases is, quite frankly, a mess, a jumble of greatest-hits packages that repeat one another endlessly. Many of her most significant LPs, among them "My Tennessee Mountain Home" (1973), remain unavailable on CD. If I were starting from scratch, I'd pick up RCA's "The Best of Dolly Parton" and move on from there to the recently remastered "Coat of Many Colors" and "Jolene" (both on Buddha). Parton's work on the 1987 "Trio," her first recording with Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris (a second followed in 1998), is lovely, particularly her rendering of the traditional "Rosewood Casket." And Parton's most recent release, "The Grass Is Blue," stands as one of the greatest albums of her career, an LP of bluegrass songs that showcases the graceful, unvarnished beauty of her voice.

If purity is what we demand of our country singers -- even our complex and sometimes puzzling ones -- then Parton, no matter how many pop-crossover successes she's had, is the consummate country singer. If I had to choose one song that crystallizes Parton's supremacy as both a singer and songwriter, it would be "Down From Dover." (The song is available on the CD set "The RCA Years, 1967-1986"; it originally appeared on the 1970 LP "The Fairest of Them All," and if the record gods have any sense of justice, they'll release this one on CD next.) The song tells the story of a young girl who's been left waiting, pregnant, for a boy who's clearly never going to come back.

As it begins, "Down From Dover" sounds much like a regular pop song, with its curlicued guitars -- by 1970 the lines between pop and country were already fairly blurred. And its story is told so straightforwardly that it's almost a miniature novel. But the mood of "Down From Dover" springs directly from the most tragic ballads of Scotland and Wales, songs that, even with centuries of mourning and keening poured into them, manage to hold tight like a corset. In these songs, emotions don't spill forth in a cathartic outpouring; they tremble inside the meter and musical phrases, concentrated, distilled and devastating.

Parton's voice tears your heart in two, not because it's sad but because it's so relentlessly hopeful, through the very end. The tiny baby dies in the woman's arms, and she explains it this way in the song's final lines, ones that hit with an anvil's force and a butterfly's delicacy: "In some strange way she must have known she'd never have a father's arms to hold her/and dying was her way of telling me he wasn't coming down from Dover."

The dying babe is, of course, the song's most highly melodramatic image. But its purpose is actually quite subtle: It exists to deflect our attention from the song's true center, the mother's pain as it's reflected in Parton's voice, because to look too directly at that would be too much to bear. The song's gracefulness may seem at odds with Parton's spun-sugar hair and glossy fingernails, and certainly it's at odds with her chirpily cheerful radio hits. But the devastating song and the desire for the glamorous trappings both spring from the same heart. And both the song and the desire are older, perhaps, than we want to allow: At least as old as the idea of a woman asking a traveling lover to bring new hair ribbons with him when he returns.

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