Little Sparrow

There you go,

brother.

I would recommend the album Little Sparrows, which is their bluegrass album.

I got it.

And I would recommend the old movie, Smoky Mountain Christmas, if you

What's your favorite song?

[laughs] Little Sparrow.

Little Sparrow.

[sighs] When she sings Little Sparrow.

[laughs]

Girl, now I'm telling you.

Is that song called Little Sparrow?

Yes.

And a couple of tracks we opened with Down From Dover, which was a classic in the Dolly Parton era.

And yes, but that version appeared on her album entitled Little Sparrow, which came out, it was the first, I think it was the first of a trio of bluegrass albums and featuring the likes of Jerry Douglas and so forth and the backing band.

Yes, Dan from Dover.

And in the middle we had Rhonda Vincent, who's a bit of a prodigy of Dolly Parton's and her version of Jolene, which of course made a lot of money for Dolly, among many other things, including an acute business sense.

And we finished up again from the album Little Sparrow.

We heard her version of the Steve Young classic Seven Bridges Road.

And yes, listeners would probably be more familiar with the Eagles version, but written by the late Steve Young and performed by him over many years.

She was trying to play the game for a while.

The part of her career that people miss is that she goes, you know, i'm not i don't want to keep up with the times anymore uh there's a new wave of people that i'm not going to compete with i'm going to go back to what i do best the records she made in the last 25 years there's a lot of really rootsy stuff on there where dolly's being dolly again going back to her early days in the 60s and 70s when she was writing these incredibly uh powerful songs kind of in a roots kind of vein um the the albums i particularly love the one she did in the late 90s and early 2000s there was the a grammy-winning record called the grass is blue and then the follow-up in 2001 called little sparrow those records are terrific she's got members of uh allison krauss's band uh performing on those uh records so real bluegrass real bluegrass stuff and and you know she knows that stuff inside and out she's returning to her roots in southern the southern appalachians you know She covers the Leuven Brothers on a track from The Grass is Blue.

Now, the Leuven Brothers were a key part of her upbringing.

This brother duo was writing these incredibly hardcore, powerful songs, so I think they influenced her songwriting and her sound early on.

Question six, Dolly Parton actually recorded three Bluegrass albums.

What were the names of the three albums? The Grass is Blue, Little Sparrow, and Halos and Horns.

They came out in 1999, 2001, and 2002, and they represented a real return to those appellation and acoustic music roots that Dolly had grown up with.

And they're excellent albums.

Think about her songs.

I mean, they're all about her, you know, from Coat of Many Colors to all the bluegrass stuff she did in the 90s to Little Sparrow and oh my God, some of that stuff.

They're all personal stories.

So she didn't mind it when other people sang her songs because she was a songwriter.

Turn of the century, turn of the millennium, she released several bluegrass albums that are mind-blowingly genius.

She released The Grass is Blue, Little Sparrow, and Halos and Horns.

And then right after that happened, 9-11.

And after 9-11, she released two albums, which are like from two different, totally different head spaces, man.