Jolene

Personnel includes: Dolly Parton (vocals); The Nashville Edition (background vocals). Producer: Bob Ferguson. Reissue producer: Mike Ragogna. Recorded at RCA's Nashville Sound Studio, Nashville, Tennessee. Originally released on RCA (0473). Includes liner notes by Robyn Flans. Digitally remastered by Elliott Federman (SAJE Sound, New York, New York). This is part of Buddha Records' Original Masters series. Although Dolly Parton had been a country star since the late '60s, this was the first of her albums to made mainstream audiences take notice of her prodigious talents as a singer and songwriter. In fact, a case can be made that this is still overall her finest work. The title song--which has been covered by no less a fan than Patti Smith--is something of a masterpiece, a piece of rural Americana that sounds as if Parton learned it as a child from some octogenarian Appalachian folk singer. The other classic here is the original version of "I Will Always Love You"; Whitney Houston may have ridden it to Number One with her 1992 version, but Parton performs it with understated subtlety, as a sort of cross between a country song and a '50s rock ballad.