A train song by a Southern rock band, a nineteenth-century ballad, and a prayer written by Billy Joel. That unlikely trio sat side by side on The Grass Is Blue, the thirty-seventh solo studio album by Dolly Parton, released October 26, 1999. The country star had spent decades at the top of the charts, but this record was not aimed at the mainstream. It was bluegrass, pure and fast, and it arrived at a moment when Parton had no record deal at all.
A label closes and an opening appears
Why did the most famous woman in country music gamble on a niche genre? The answer begins with a closed office. In early 1999, Decca Records shut down its Nashville branch, leaving Parton without a label. She had been a fixture of country radio for years, yet suddenly she had no one to release her music. Most artists would have scrambled for the next big contract. Parton saw an opening.
That July, over dinner, producer Steve Buckingham made a suggestion: a bluegrass album. He told Parton that when bluegrass fans were asked which artist they would most like to hear in the genre, her name came up more than any other. It was a strange proposition. Bluegrass was a small, traditional world, and Parton was a global star. But she had grown up singing mountain music and bluegrass, and she picked songs she had known all her life.
Bluegrass players in two Nashville studios
The recording took place in August 1999 in two Nashville studios, The Sound Kitchen and The Doghouse. Parton did not bring session players from the pop-country circuit. She called in the best bluegrass musicians working: Jerry Douglas on Dobro, Sam Bush on mandolin, Stuart Duncan on fiddle, Alison Krauss and Rhonda Vincent on harmony vocals. The sessions moved fast. Parton said later that with players like these, the work almost did itself.
The song choices told the story of her roots. "Silver Dagger," a ballad from the late nineteenth century, had been popularized by Joan Baez in the early 1960s. "Steady as the Rain" was a song Parton had written for her younger sister Stella, who took it into the top forty in 1979. There was also "Train, Train," a cover of the Blackfoot song, and Billy Joel's "Travelin' Prayer." The first single, "A Few Old Memories," came out the day before the album.
Chart numbers and daytime television
On release day, Parton appeared on Live with Regis & Kelly, bringing bluegrass to a daytime audience that had never asked for it. The album climbed to number 24 on Billboard's Top Country Albums chart and reached number 198 on the Billboard 200. By December 2003, it had sold 195,000 copies in the United States. Those were not pop numbers, but for a bluegrass record they were remarkable.
The industry noticed. The Grass Is Blue won the Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album, and "Travelin' Prayer" earned a Grammy nomination for Best Female Country Vocal Performance. At the International Bluegrass Music Awards in 2000, the album was named Album of the Year. Parton, the woman without a label a year earlier, had walked into a genre she loved and taken its highest honors.
The record did more than collect trophies. Along with the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack and the work of Alison Krauss, The Grass Is Blue helped push bluegrass into the wider public ear in the early 2000s. What began as a dinner-table idea between Parton and Steve Buckingham became one of the records that brought an old American sound back to the foreground.
Parton had managed her own affairs and run her own label, which gave her the freedom to make the record at all. She did not wait for permission. She chose the songs, hired the musicians, and let the music speak. The Grass Is Blue was not a comeback or a detour. It was Dolly Parton returning to the music she had sung all her life, and proving that the road back could win a Grammy.