‘Dolly Parton is in the foundation of society’: Columbus musicians pay tribute to the country great

In preparing for “Grindstones & Rhinestones: A Tribute to Dolly Parton,” Caroline Crow, one half of the Hen & the Crow, began to revisit Parton’s version of “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos),” originally written by Woody Guthrie and covered on the album 9 to 5 and Odd Jobs, from 1980. 

Rooted in a 1948 plane crash that killed 32 people, including 28 migrant farm workers who were being deported back to Mexico from California, Crow viewed in the narrative echoes of this political and social moment, and in particular the brutal crackdown on immigrants being undertaken by the Trump administration, which on Saturday led to the killing of Minneapolis resident and ICU nurse Alex Pretti by a still-unnamed U.S. Border Patrol officer. 

“And I haven’t been able to practice [the song] much, because it makes me really emotional,” said Crow, who joined Mery Steel for a late January interview ahead of the concert at Natalie’s Grandview on Friday, Jan. 30, which also serves as a benefit for Matter News. “And I’m definitely thinking about the ICE presence in Columbus and Minneapolis, especially this past weekend, with the second shooting we’ve seen in two weeks. Being someone who works a lot in the activism space, I write a lot of protest music, and I really look up to Dolly for doing that, as well, and writing about labor and speaking on things that are important to her.”

“Grindstones & Rhinestones” should cover a wide swath of Parton’s deep, diverse catalog. Crow said she and Wesley Crow are focused more on the musician’s traditional, bluegrass-steeped duets, while Steel plans to center “hot rippers” such as “Sure Thing,” a song she described as sounding “like Dolly Parton doing Tina Turner.” The evening’s lineup is rounded out by the country singer Moe Reen, whom Crow and Steel both envisioned pulling from Parton’s wealth of emotionally wrenching, tear-stained ballads. 

“I don’t know if this is too much of a spoiler for the show, but ‘Farther Along’ is like a hymn that Dolly did on her trio record with Emmylou [Harris] and Linda [Ronstadt], and I’m taking a verse, Caroline is taking a verse, and Mo is taking a verse,” Steel said. “And I love how different we are, and how different our takes are. And I can’t wait to give that to the audience, because we all sound so great together but also so much ourselves.”

Both Crow and Steel took different paths to discovering Parton, with Steel first encountering her more sporadically – in the 1986 made-for-TV movie “Unlikely Angel” and in advertisements for the Time/Life country music compilation – and Crow raised in a home where the country star’s music served as part of a running soundtrack. And yet, both eventually came to realize how deeply entwined Parton is with the larger cultural DNA.

“I feel like Dolly Parton is in the foundation of society, where she’s ubiquitous and always doing something – writing great songs, working with cool people, and generally just being a good lady,” Steel said. “I think she influenced me in the way that she influenced everybody. I think she’s just always been here.”

As a songwriter, Steel and Crow hailed Parton’s ability to home in on “a really damn good hook,” in addition to her ability to breathe life into a range of richly relatable characters. “If you look at her 9 to 5 album, a lot of that is music for laborers, which I think a lot of us working musicians can understand,” Crow said. “And there’s this Appalachian aspect that speaks to a lot of people from that region, with her stories of mining towns and poverty. There’s just something so relatable about that kind of American music, and she does it well.”

In recent weeks, Crow said she has spent more time seeking out Parton’s duets, which she described as equal parts tender and sassy, the singer leaning into an aspect of the form where the partners gently rib one another in the song. “It’s can be similar to the other duets you see in country music, like with Conway Twitty and Loretta Lynn or George [Jones] and Tammy [Wynette], where they’re poking fun at one another the whole time, and Dolly does not shy from that,” said Crow, who in this listening also began to note Parton’s tendency to gently speak a line in a song as it reached an emotional apex. “In ‘I Will Always Love You,’ she’s like, ‘I wish you love and happiness,’ and she speaks that, and it’s very tender. And then in ‘Deportee,’ she’s singing about an airplane wreck and a fire that took the lives of these people being deported, and she goes, ‘The radio said they were just deportees,’ and she speaks that line, and it hits so hard, coming from her, coming from that softness. Especially now, living in a similar climate.”