Live Review: Dolly Parton

As her ten-piece backing band kicks off the evening with an instrumental medley of her biggest hits, Dolly Parton strolls onto the stage, all hair, heels and sequins, with a few giggles into her headset before launching into her bombastic 1978 hit Baby I'm Burning. Segueing surprisingly into Alicia Keys' This Girl Is On Fire, it's the first of many times Parton shows her appreciation of other songwriters this evening, and proof that she's an ever-evolving industry stalwart and not one simply dining out on the hits of yore.

Jolene appears early, with all the wonderful vocal nuances of the album cut delivering the fragile emotion of a desperate woman in a way the popularised covers were never able to, though Parton makes light of the true tale by exclaiming: “I'm glad you remembered Jolene – I've been tryin' to forget her for 47 years!” Introducing the title track of her new record Blue Smoke, Parton complements the shuffling rhythms and delectable harmonies with the vocal intonations of the central train character, following up with Bob Dylan's Don't Think Twice by pondering out loud about what she'd call an entire record of his covers: “Dolly Does Dylan – does that sound too much like Debbie Does Dallas?”

Parton is hilarious in her self-deprecation, though she also shares some heartwarming and often sad insights from her own life of growing up dirt poor in a family of 14 in the mountains of Tennessee of which her well known story Coat Of Many Colours – now a children's book to prevent bullying – is a tear-inducing highlight.

Even with two hours the 68-year-old barely has time to squeeze even the key career singles in, so a cleverly curated medley goes some way to covering some of the old favourites; excerpts of It's All Wrong But It's All Right, Real Love, Think About Love and the utterly beguiling Bargain Store sit alongside the gorgeous folk guitar of Love Is Like A Butterfly which has lent its shape to the stage design. Parton grabs one of her three backing vocalists to duet Islands In The Stream before noting the standing, cheering crowd: “You're all rowdy now, why don't we sing 9 To 5?” Finally, she closes with an emotional rendition of I Will Always Love You, perhaps tonight's most obvious display of a perfect vocal few in this world can rival. Parton's charm, wit and underlying humanity has reached into the hearts of every single punter tonight, an almost impossible feat considering the venue capacity. Even though her voice seems to defy her age and her enviable stage energy is as bubbly and vivacious as a teen, she could have simply talked for the whole show and the audience would have been as equally captivated. Dolly Parton – just wow.