Dolly Parton, Songteller: My Life in Lyrics by
Dolly Parton
My rating:
3 of 5 stars
If you are going to listen to Dolly’s audiobook of “The Songwriter”, I suggest a drinking game. Every time she says one of her songs is her favorite, take a drink. You might not make it halfway through. This is an interesting kind of audiobook. It is recordings of Dolly answering off-mike questions and talking about topics. Mostly she talks about her songs, but she also does talk about other singers, her history with Porter Wagner, her childhood, her movies and TV shows, and her lineup of movies on Netflix. I suspect Netflix sponsored this, as she mentions her movies on the platform a number of times throughout, and they were always named with the same trademarked series title. Dolly knows how to make a buck.
With this format, Dolly might have been at a loss for unique things to talk about given her songs as prompts. As you listen, you are first charmed by her responses, so country, so straight forward, so gracious. As the program continues, you find that Dolly tends to repeat a lot of what she has to say. There are plenty of platitudes repeated. I liked the presentation, but about a third could have been cut out without any loss of content. Given this is mostly a stream-of-consciousness recording, you aren’t getting well-thought-out sequences, it’s more hit-or-miss as to the anecdotes she relates. That is to say this isn’t a replacement for a good autobiography. The audiobook did have an occasional narrator to explain what Dolly was talking about (since they didn’t include the interviewer on audio), and an occasional song snippet when beginning to discuss a song. The song snippets were nice, and interestingly were the first lines of the songs, not the choruses.
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