Dolly Parton had a problem with her forty-first solo studio album. She had planned to call it Blue Smoke, fill it partly with her own new songs, and release it in the first half of 2005. Then the idea shifted, and the record became something far riskier: a collection of folk and pop songs from the 1960s and 1970s, every one of them rebuilt in bluegrass style. The country star was betting that her audience would follow her into a genre she had loved long before she became famous. Dolly Parton released Those Were the Days on October 11, 2005.
The country star was betting that her audience would follow her into a genre she had loved long before she became famous.
Sugar Hill release and guest singers
The album, titled Those Were the Days, arrived on 11 October 2005 through Sugar Hill Records and Blue Eye Records. Parton produced it herself, and she did not do it alone. She reached out to the people who had written or originally sung these songs, inviting them into the studio. Some said yes. Kris Kristofferson joined her for Me and Bobby McGee, the song he had written. Judy Collins, who made Both Sides Now famous, sang on that track alongside bluegrass vocalist Rhonda Vincent.
The guest list reads like a roll call of country and folk royalty. Keith Urban duetted on The Twelfth of Never, while Joe Nichols took on If I Were a Carpenter. Roger McGuinn, the voice of The Byrds, lent his presence to Turn, Turn, Turn. For the title track, Parton assembled a small choir of veteran country singers: Porter Wagoner, George Jones, Brenda Lee, and seven others. The song Those Were the Days, a nostalgic waltz about lost youth, became a reunion of voices that had defined Nashville for decades.
Nickel Creek and Norah Jones
Parton did not stop with the old guard. She brought in Nickel Creek, the young acoustic trio, for Blowin' in the Wind. Norah Jones and Lee Ann Womack shared the microphone on Where Have All the Flowers Gone. Yusuf Islam, formerly Cat Stevens, sang on Where Do the Children Play, one of his own compositions. Alison Krauss, Mindy Smith, and Dan Tyminski harmonized on The Cruel War. Even David Foster, the pop producer and pianist, appeared on Imagine.
The recording sessions sprawled across 2004 and 2005, taking Parton to studios in Nashville, Cardiff, London, New York, Malibu, and other cities. The title track was cut on 1 July. But the project had a ghost: the song Blue Smoke, which was supposed to anchor the original version of the album, stayed unreleased for years. It finally surfaced in 2014 as the title track of a different Parton record. The album she released in 2005 had become something else entirely, a tribute record built on other people's words.
First-week sales and chart placings
The gamble paid off commercially. In its first week, the album sold 21,500 copies in the United States. It entered the Billboard Top Country Albums chart at number 9 and landed at number 48 on the Billboard 200. On the independent albums chart, it climbed to number 2. In the United Kingdom, it topped the country chart and reached number 35 on the main albums chart. By October 2006, American sales had reached 151,000 copies.
Critics were mostly kind, though not unanimous. The Observer gave it four stars out of five. AllMusic settled on three stars. PopMatters scored it seven out of ten but wrote a largely negative review. One writer for No Depression questioned whether Parton was being sincere, linking the album to her earlier patriotic project For God and Country. The suggestion stung. Parton answered simply: she was not protesting, she was not political, she was a patriot who loved peace.
The album's singles told their own story. Imagine arrived as an iTunes exclusive on 27 September 2005, weeks before the full record. Both Sides Now followed in December and hit number 1 on the Indie World Country Singles Chart in March 2006. The Twelfth of Never came out in Australia only and reached number 3 on the Country Tracks Top 30. Where Do the Children Play was released in Europe on 20 March 2006 and missed the charts entirely.
Parton supported the record with the Vintage Tour, a run of 42 concerts across North America from August to December 2005. She promoted it on television too, appearing on Late Night with Conan O'Brien, Good Morning America, The Daily Show, The View, The Early Show, and The Tony Danza Show. The woman who had once planned a record of her own songs had instead spent a year singing other people's, surrounded by the people who wrote them. It was a bluegrass detour that only Dolly Parton could have pulled off.