Sisters in Country: Dolly, Linda and Emmylou

# Jolene, Jolene Jolene, Jolene... #

In the mid-'70s, Dolly Parton, the Tennessee mountain girl,

was Nashville's leading female star.

Meanwhile, over in California,

baby boomers were discovering their own kind of country.

# I don't want your lonely mansion

# With a tear in every room... #

Linda Ronstadt, the West Coast country rock chick,

was the biggest female pop star in America.

And former folkie Emmylou Harris had gone from student to band leader

and was taking country to the college crowd.

# Oh, Amarillo

# Now he won't come home no more... #

Three women from different backgrounds,

with different audiences, but sisters in song.

# Silver threads and golden needles

# Cannot mend this heart of mine... #

Come in here.

ALL: # Silver threads and golden needles

# Cannot mend... #

All of a sudden, it was like, "Oh, my goodness,

"this is such a great sound!"

It was like, "Bam!" That sound was there,

and we just were all kind of shocked by it.

# Well, he may know where I am sleeping

# Then perhaps he'll wait for me... #

Mainstream country had met West Coast cool

and formed an unlikely alliance.

'Emmy and Linda were both really shy and introverted girls.'

Not Dolly. HE LAUGHS

She was like shot out of a cannon.

Howdy, partners!

For Dolly, it was a reaching out into a different audience.

And for Linda and Emmylou, it was honouring the music of Dolly Parton.

They could have come from different countries,

but they all loved mountain music.

She had this authenticity, with that mountain music, that we both loved.

# Until the day

# They lay me

# Down. #

'They came from Scotland and Ireland mostly.

'Plainish people.

'With dry humour and gunpowder tempers.

'Sentimental, too.

'Lovers of song and respecters of God.'

Dolly Rebecca Parton was born and raised in East Tennessee,

the fourth of 12 children. Growing up dirt poor,

she had big ambitions and dreamt of becoming a star.

She wrote her first song aged seven, and music was her route to the top.

There's that mountain sound that those people sing.

And that's just built in my whole body.

Those old mountain twirls and twists and things,

it's just part of my Smoky Mountain DNA.

In 1964, the 18-year-old Dolly headed to Nashville

in the attempt to become a country star.

Everybody knew the Grand Ole Opry came from Nashville.

It's kind of all the people that want to be on Broadway, it's like,

"We want to go to New York."

So if you're a country singer, you want to go to Nashville.

To much of the rest of America, the South was stuck in the past.

The home of hillbillies, where girl singers were second-class citizens.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, we'd like you to meet our little lady singer.

She's an excellent songwriter, an outstanding artist.

A very devoted wife and mother. A wonderful cook.

She has a voice like an angel and a face to match.

Let's meet and greet our little lady singer, Loretta Lynn. Here she is.

# I don't know your name

# I wouldn't know your face

# But you're out with the one I love

# Out there someplace... #

I loved Nashville because that's where I knew my dreams were

going to come true, if they were going to come true at all,

they were going to start there.

Dolly's combination of homespun songwriting and showbiz smarts

made her popular with the Nashville audience,

and she scooped a record deal.

# Well, a good ways down the railroad track

# There was this little old rundown shack

# And in it lived a man I'd never seen

# Folks said he was a mean and a vicious man

# And you better not set foot on his land

# But I didn't think nobody could be that mean... #

I think Dolly always wanted to be a star,

which I found incredibly sweet and innocent.

You know, because she's done it. In an extraordinary way.

But it comes from a place that's...

When you're young and you have those dreams,

and she was able to keep hold of that.

'And now, in colour, it's The Porter Wagoner Show,

'starring Porter Wagoner and the Wagonmasters,

'with Speck Rhodes and Dolly Parton.'

# We're so glad to see you Kinda wondered how you been... #

And in 1967, Dolly became the girl singer

for one of Nashville's biggest stars.

Thank you, Dolly, and all the boys there, for helping me out.

Dolly Parton had cut her teeth

as the featured female artist in The Porter Wagoner Show.

It was a very traditional type of role for a female artist.

Often they weren't headliners. Even, you know, by the late 1960s,

only a handful of female artists had really headlined their own show.

# It's a lesson too late for the learning

# Made of sand, made of sand

# In the wink of an eye my soul is turning

# In your hand, in your hand... #

Over on the East Coast, 19-year-old folk music lover

Emmylou Harris was getting switched on to the music of this country duo.

My brother was a big country music fan.

And he said, "I want to play you something."

And it was Dolly and Porter,

but they were doing a Tom Paxton song, The Last Thing On My Mind.

# I could have loved you better

# Didn't mean to be unkind

# You know that was the last thing on my mind... #

I loved those duets with Porter.

And of course Dolly's voice on that is so...

When she sang with Porter,

it was such a beautiful springboard for her voice.

# My coat of many colours

# That my papa made for me

# Made only from rags

# But I wore it so proudly... #

When a young Linda Ronstadt visited Nashville,

she discovered Dolly was smarter than she chose to appear.

I was invited to the Grand Ole Opry when I was in Tennessee,

and Dolly was on stage

singing with about a million petticoats in her skirt,

just stacked out to there, her hair all up to there and her high heels.

And she just looked like a beautiful Christmas tree.

I mean, it was just a sight to behold, she was gorgeous.

# I know we had no money

# But I was rich as I could be

# In my coat of many colours

# My momma made for me

# Made just for me. #

She said, "Don't think I'm dumb just because I'm so country."

It had not occurred to me that she was dumb. Anything but, you know?

Dolly Parton was the Queen of Nashville, and now she had

her eyes on a bigger prize, and nothing was going to stop her.

She was definitely on the rise as a female country star.

But the wider pop world didn't really know about her so much then.

Up until this point in history,

country music is sort of by and for adults.

The music wasn't attractive to the vast youth market.

'One, two, three, four!'

FANS SCREAM

While Dolly was conquering Nashville, the Beatles were

igniting the rest of America, and a new generation was emerging.

'But the pandemonium created by the 3,000 teenagers on hand

'to greet the sortie of Britain's bristling Beatles

'is something one might expect from a collision of planets.'

Born in Arizona in 1946, the same year as Dolly Parton,

Linda Ronstadt was a classic '60s kid who'd grown up on '50s radio.

Across the border in Mexico were these huge transmitters,

they could transmit stations that came from Tennessee

or came from Chicago, came from New York.

They would have been illegal if they had been on this side of the line, but they were across in Mexico.

I listened to black gospel, white gospel, country music, rock'n'roll.

And then of course tons of Mexican music,

because we were right there on the border, my family is Mexican.

Everybody in my family played and sang,

including my grandmother and my great-aunts.

They'd all, you know, play anything from operatic arias

to Mexican love songs.

My sister would sing the latest Hank Williams songs,

or the latest rock'n'roll songs.

It was really great, I liked that. Very eclectic.

Linda left Tucson in 1964 after dropping out of college at 18,

and went west, like so many of her generation.

'60s kid Linda was drawn to Los Angeles and the Troubadour,

which might as well have been

a million miles away from the Grand Ole Opry.

It was just the place to be seen and to play.

And the main reason was that it had open mic night.

# So you want to be a rock'n'roll star?

# Then listen now to what I say

# Just get an electric guitar

# And take some time... #

You could go and sort of audition and sing and perform

on an open mic night, you know?

And get a job there opening for some bigger act.

# Then it's time to go downtown... #

Everyone assumes when there's any kind of musical movement

that the members of it all necessarily hang out together

and know each other, and sing together and play together,

and often it's not really the case,

but in LA it was the case. CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

Everybody was there -

Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Carole King, James Taylor, The Byrds...

There was this huge hodgepodge of great writers,

and everybody that came into LA would drift through the Troubadour.

It was at the Troubadour that Linda's band, the Stone Poneys,

were signed after being spotted performing at a hoot.

# You and I travel to the beat of a different drum

# Oh, can't you tell by the way I run

# Every time you make eyes at me?

# It's true... #

It was Linda that stood out.

Somebody had told me that there was this amazing girl singer

who was, like, had this voice of extraordinary power and beauty,

and also, you know, sang in bare feet and short shorts

and was incredibly hot, and it was all true.

That was the first time I heard her sing,

and I was completely blown away.

# Saying I'm not ready for any person... #

The main things that stand out about Linda's voice,

and I think it's one of the iconic voices in American music

of our time, is the power.

# Oh, goodbye

# I'll be leaving I see no sense... #

For me, this is not a very large girl.

She's a small girl and yet her voice is beyond powerful.

That's what struck me about hearing her voice for the first time.

I was just drawn to it.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Troubadour

is proud to present Linda Ronstadt.

APPLAUSE

In 1968, Linda left the Stone Poneys and set about finding her niche.

The record company Capitol was a little confused about

should she go pure country or should she do rock?

So combining those two things helped Linda, I think,

fuse the elements of country and rock into her style,

and I think led to most of what she did later.

This is a song I learned from Patsy Cline,

and it's called I Fall To Pieces.

Linda embraced country, and she gave it a new kind of hipness,

which saw it reaching out to the West Coast kids.

# I fall to pieces

# Each time someone speaks your name... #

I always turn back to what was in the living room

in my childhood home before I was aged ten.

If I didn't hear it by the time I was ten,

I really couldn't do it with any authenticity.

MUSIC: Don't Think Twice, It's All Right by Joan Baez

Born just a year after Linda and Dolly was a singer

who would go on to become one of their greatest collaborators.

Emmylou Harris was raised a middle-class child of

a military family in the suburbs of North Carolina.

Unlike Dolly and Linda, she didn't have a musical upbringing.

I didn't grow up in a family where people sang. I was the only one.

I was, kind of, the weirdo.

# When the rooster crows at the break of dawn... #

College student Emmylou was inspired by the music of John Baez

and Bob Dylan, and the protest songs rallying against the unrest

of mid-'60s America.

# But don't think twice It's all right. #

Aspiring folk singer Emmylou headed east

to the Greenwich Village folk scene of the late '60s.

# Calliope calling

# Children are falling in line to ride on the merry-go-round

# People are passing

# Children are laughing

# They want to ride on the merry-go-round... #

'Folk music drew me in through the storytelling.'

# Every ride is just the same... #

'I decided to try to go to New York and try to be a folk singer

'after dropping out of college.'

# There is room for everyone... #

There were so many of us at my age who had long hair and wanted

to be Joan Baez, but there'll only ever be one Joan Baez.

# Sometimes right and sometimes wrong

# You'll end up where you belong... #

I dabbled in country, but mainly I...

To my shame, I kind of did it as a joke.

563, 30, 30...

At the dawn of a new decade, Nashville's country fell on

one side of a divided nation -

middle America versus the nation's youth.

# We don't smoke marijuana in Muskogee

# We don't take our trips on LSD

# We don't burn our draft cards down on Main Street

# Cos we like livin' right and bein' free... #

But Emmylou was about to discover the poetry of classic honky-tonk.

How I went from folk to country is Gram Parsons.

MUSIC: Christine's Tune by The Flying Burrito Brothers

Gram Parsons saw the soul in country

and championed it in his own unique rock'n'roll way.

# She's a devil in disguise

# You can see it in her eyes... #

Gram had a kind of a cult audience, you know, he...

From The Byrds' Sweetheart Of The Rodeo,

and then The Flying Burrito Brothers,

there was definitely a, sort of,

a country audience of kids who, like myself,

hadn't really grown up with it, but Gram kind of made it cool.

The Southern California country rock scene, you know,

it was country music being played by longhairs for the first time,

because, you know, Nashville was more conservative.

# We're gonna hold on... #

Wild child Gram was one of the West Coast rockers

who took influence from Nashville's stars

and wanted to find his very own girl singer.

# We're gonna ho-o-o-old on... #

We talked and he said, "I'm going to make a record

"and I want to find someone to sing with."

I said, "There's a wonderful woman working out of

"Washington DC, Emmylou Harris. You need to call her up."

# The mention of... #

I was thinking to myself, "OK, well, let's see if she can cut it or not,"

so I thought of one of the hardest country duets

I could think of to do,

which was That's All It Took.

# I tried so hard

# To let you go

# But look... #

And she just sang like a bird, and I said, "Well, that's it."

And I sang with her the rest of the night,

and then she just kept getting better and better.

BOTH: # And when today I heard them say your name

# That's all it took... #

I just got into it, I mean,

and became a convert -

almost obnoxious convert.

He introduced her to the passion of...

the poetry involved in country music.

# Ooh

# Las Vegas

# Ain't no place for a poor boy like me... #

Gram gave Emmylou country music.

Emmylou, in turn, gave Gram the most wonderful singer -

duet singer - he could find.

# Every time I hit your crystal city

# You know you're gonna make a wreck out of me... #

When I was learning about country,

I felt, "This is something I'm really good at."

You know, I felt like I had found my place, somehow.

What she brought to him was a stability -

a stable factor in getting him focused,

cos I couldn't. I tried!

MUSIC: Six Days On The Road by The Flying Burrito Brothers

# Well, I pulled out of Pittsburgh

# Rollin' down the eastern seaboard... #

Emmylou paid her dues on the road with Gram and the Fallen Angels,

and it was in a Texan honky-tonk

that her friendship with Linda began in 1973.

We were in Texas.

We were in Houston with the Neil Young tour

and I heard that Gram and Emmy were in town.

We ran into their road manager in the lobby of the hotel,

and so we all decided that we'd go down

to see their show after our show.

# It was 40 or 50 years ago

# A big shot played with time... #

And so we went to this biker bar where they were playing,

and I was worried I wouldn't be able to hear Emmy properly,

cos it was a really rowdy, noisy place,

but the minute she started singing, the place just went dead quiet

and everybody just had this worshipful attitude, you know?

# When you saw him talk his way

# Was when he showed his claws... #

When the two of them were onstage, it was like a musical love affair.

They were just so focused.

They had their mics set so that they could look right at each other,

you know? And they would just follow each other exactly.

It was a lovely, lovely musical thing.

# Ooh-ooh

# The new soft shoe

# Ooh, the new soft shoe

# Yeah... #

And I had a little fleeting moment when I thought,

"She's doing what I'm doing but she's doing it better."

And I thought, "I can feel jealous or I can just really love her

"like everybody else does."

# The new soft shoe... #

The admiration was mutual.

I had seen her in New York,

in my struggling Joan Baez wannabe days in the Village

and had seen her, actually, perform,

was incredibly jealous,

and did not actually meet her.

But Gram knew Linda, and I was introduced,

and that became a very important relationship for me,

as a friendship.

MUSIC: Boulder To Birmingham by Emmylou Harris

# I don't want to hear a love song... #

Their friendship deepened in September 1973,

when Emmylou's mentor Gram died from an overdose at just 26 years old.

# And I know there's life below me... #

When Gram died, Emmylou, along with everyone else, was shattered.

I'd thought I was going to spend quite a lot of my life

singing with Gram.

# And I don't want to hear a sad story

# Full of heartbreak and desire... #

I was the beneficiary of the fact that he went before me

and, kind of, left me this, you know,

this place that he had vacated.

And I just had to figure out how to continue,

and I had a lot of help.

It was very hard on Emmy,

and she came out to stay with me for a while in Los Angeles.

Emmylou confronted her grief in song,

and wrote the anthemic Boulder To Birmingham and played it to Linda.

# I watched it burn... #

She sat down in the living room and played me that song,

I almost fell over.

I mean, that's a really strong piece of material.

# I would rock my soul

# In the bosom of Abraham... #

And it broke my heart that Emmy had to go through what she had to go through to write about it,

but it really established her as a serious songwriter.

# I would walk all the way

# From Boulder to Birmingham

# If I thought I could see

# I could see your face... #

# Well, you really got... #

'Bringing me out to sing on her records,

'having me come and sing at her shows -

'she did a lot for me,

'as the incredibly generous person that she is.'

This was right before everything broke through for Linda,

you know, who became the biggest rock star in the world.

# Feelin' better

# Now that we're through

# Feelin' better cos I'm over you... #

With the addition of Peter Asher as Linda's manager and record producer,

her retro song choices and polished sound saw her star ascend.

# Oh, you're no good You're no good

# You're no good

# Baby, you're no good

# I'm going to say it again

# You're no good You're no good... #

She was doing both styles at that time,

both the rockier stuff and the country stuff,

and so radio embraced that single and it was a big, big hit.

# When will I be loved? #

She had hit single after hit single, huge tours...

She was - no argument about it -

the biggest female artist in rock at the time.

# When will I be

# Loved? #

Meanwhile, Emmylou was forging a solo career out of California,

leading a hot band and an eclectic songbook that took in

classic country and rock'n'roll.

She brought to the country music audience, maybe,

a more younger take on, you know, what a country singer,

a young female country singer, could be.

# Oh, Amarillo

# What you want my baby for? #

As far as country-slash- rock-and-roll fusion happening,

that was a really electrifying band.

They could really play,

and Emmylou was right out in front of that

just with an enormous amount of energy

and an enormous amount of focus.

The sisterhood was set to expand when Emmylou and Linda discovered

they shared a mutual appreciation of the girl from Tennessee.

There weren't that many girl singers out there, so, you know,

you'd think, "This is a like soul. I want to know who influences her.

"Who is the most important person?"

She wanted to know that about me and our answer was Dolly Parton.

APPLAUSE

# Jolene, Jolene, Jolene

# Jolene

# I'm begging of you Please don't take my man

# Jolene, Jolene, Jolene

# Jolene

# Please don't take him just because you can... #

Back in the South, as Linda and Emmylou were taking country to

a rock crowd, Dolly was about to take classic country to the world.

We'd both heard Jolene on the radio and gone,

"Oh, my God, this girl can really sing." You know?

She was singing like she was singing, I was just knocked out.

# Your smile is like a breath of spring

# Your voice is soft like summer rain

# And I cannot compete with you, Jolene... #

Sort of like that.

We loved her songwriting.

But we... Mainly we loved her voice.

# Nothin' I can do to keep from cryin'... #

Dolly's voice goes into that incredibly beautiful,

lovely, sparkly place.

# Oh, and I can easily understand

# How you could easily take my man

# But you don't know what he means to me, Jolene... #

In 1974, after seven years with Porter,

Dolly decided to go it alone.

Nashville's Music Row is buzzing today over

yesterday's bombshell announcement -

the $3 million lawsuit by Porter Wagoner against Dolly Parton.

The suit charges Dolly with breach of contract.

Dolly had a lot of faith in herself.

Dolly believed she could do it on her own.

It was very nervy, though,

for a woman in country music to do what she did,

which was to break out of her mentor's shadow,

which was Porter Wagoner, leave his show,

go out on her own as a solo artist and try to make it on her own.

Dolly got herself big-time LA management

and went Hollywood with her own country show.

Ladies and gentlemen, Dolly Parton. APPLAUSE

The attitude in Nashville at the time was,

"Well, she's leaving country music and we don't like her,"

and, you know, this and that. And Dolly famously said,

"I'm not leaving country - I'm taking it with me,"

which is exactly what she did.

# Jolene

# Jolene... #

Country was the blue-collar sound of the rural South, so it seemed

unlikely that a cool country curator would be captivated by Dolly.

This next song, um, is written by Dolly Parton.

She did Dolly's song Coat Of Many Colours every night,

and, you know, her eyes would sparkle.

You know, like, "I'm doing a Dolly Parton song."

# Back through the years

# I go wanderin' once again

# Back to the seasons of my youth I recall... #

'Coat Of Many Colours was... It had become'

one of my favourite songs when I got into country.

And, of course, there was a certain folk element to Dolly, too,

because a lot of her writing was very storytelling.

# Momma sewed the rags together

# Sewin' every piece with love

# She made my coat of many colours

# That I was so proud of... #

To her audience, you know,

which was counterculture audience, really, at the time,

it was like, "And I'm introducing you to this great artist

"that you may not know about."

# Though we didn't have much money

# I was rich as I could be... #

I had no idea they knew me or liked me.

I just remembered loving their records.

# Momma made for me... #

A shared interest in harmony led to them becoming friends.

I first invited Dolly when she came out to California,

cos she was still living in Nashville, and when I knew

she was coming over, the first thing I did was call Linda.

I said, "I'll be right there,"

so I got in my car and zoomed over as fast as I could.

And, you know, they were sitting on the sofa talking,

and I came in, and we talked for a second, then the guitar came out.

And they were all excited to meet me.

I was all excited to meet them.

And so we said, "Well, we have to sing something."

And we started singing the Carter Family song,

Bury Me Beneath The Willow.

# Bury me beneath the willow

# Under the weeping willow tree

# Where he may know where I am sleeping

# And perhaps he'll weep for me... #

And all of a sudden, it was like,

"Oh, my goodness! This is such a great sound."

And it was like, bam! That sound was there, and we were just...

We were all kind of shocked by it. We just went,

"Wow, that's really something that's different from what we usually do

"with other musicians that we jam and play and sing with."

Let's do it again.

ALL: # Won't you bury me beneath the willow... #

In 1976, the trio took their sound public

when Dolly invited them onto her show.

That particular episode was different

than all of the other Dolly episodes.

The other Dolly episodes had kind of fakey banter and jokes and junk

and this one, of all of the shows in that series,

was the most purely musical.

My momma used to sing a song called The Sweetest Gift,

when she was a little girl,

and she loved the record that you and Linda had on it and

she asked me if I'd have you sing it today, so would you do that? Sure.

Well, OK. This is for your momma. Right. And for mine.

# One day a mother... APPLAUSE

# ..went to a prison

# To see an erring but precious son

# She told the warden

# How much she loved him... #

Linda came from a singing family and you certainly came from

a singing family. I definitely did, yeah. So I was really loving it.

# She did not bring to him a parole or pardon

# She brought no silver Brought no... #

As eager students of Dolly,

Emmylou and Linda were excited by what she added to the music.

The uniting thread is the mountain heritage.

The Appalachian sound that Dolly just brings naturally to the music,

because that's who she is.

# ..a mother's smile

# She left a smile you can remember

# She's gone to heaven from heartache free... #

'She had this authenticity for that mountain music that we both loved,

'but didn't feel we had the right...'

Yes, we would sing it, but she was the real deal.

# ..and e'er will be... #

She came out of the foothills and mountains of eastern Tennessee,

with the real thing and I think, if you add that to the mix of...

Emmy and Linda's relationship, it's like there's the...

your gender's Mount Rushmore!

# The sweetest gift A mother's smile

# The sweetest gift

# A mother's smile... #

APPLAUSE Ooh, I love that!

'We really enjoyed each other's company.

'It just seemed fun at the time.'

I don't remember there being any trauma

or worrying about the lighting or anything, because we were so young

and we knew we looked good and we didn't have to worry about anything.

SHE LAUGHS

Where are you?

What are you doing in the audience?

It's the only way we could get anything to eat.

Oh, ha-ha! And we wanted to see the show from here.

'Dolly Parton is larger than life

'from the moment you lay eyes on her.'

She was exotic!

Er, taking nothing away from Linda or Emmylou,

they were kind of girl next door,

they were the really cute girls from down the street, you know,

who could sing like birds.

# Play a song for me Applejack, Applejack

# Play a song for me and I'll sing... #

It wasn't only the viewers that were treated to this unlikely grouping.

Musically, it opened up a whole new audience for all involved.

# I'd go down to Applejack's just almost every day, we'd sit and... #

'Although we were mismatched, in the worlds we came from,'

once we opened our mouths to sing, you know,

even though we didn't look like we would fit together,

when you heard us, you felt it and you saw it.

# Play a song for me Applejack, Applejack

# Play a song Let your banjo ring... #

'The idea of Linda and Dolly and Emmylou

'appearing on television together was a big deal.

'It drew in three disparate audiences.'

Linda brought her audience, er, Emmy hers

and Dolly, of course, it was her show.

Clap your hands with us! # Play a song for me... #

I think television did things like that for commercial reasons,

but artistically, it ended up being incredibly helpful

to all three of them as well.

Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou, for Dolly, were street cred.

'Really intense street cred.'

# Play a song for me... #

'For Linda and Emmylou,

'it was honouring the authenticity of the music of Dolly Parton.'

Look, this is a brilliant artist,

you know, and I think the rest of the world

has come around to that point of view.

I think Emmy and Linda just saw it before the rest of the world did.

Aw!

APPLAUSE AND CHEERING

That buzz, we just felt...

At that moment, we all said, "We have to make a record!"

We just wanted to do it for the music and we didn't know that

it would be successful, we didn't care, we just wanted to do it.

SHE LAUGHS We figured we'd earned the right.

In 1979, setting time aside from their solo careers, the trio began

laying down tracks with Emmylou's husband, producer Brian Ahern.

# Mr Sandman

# Bring me a dream

# Make him the cutest that I've ever seen... #

But it soon became obvious

that, musically, the approach they took wasn't working out.

We got above our raison a little bit, because, all of a sudden,

we thought, "Man, we could make a great pop record."

# ..I'm so alone... #

But Brian just said, "This is a mistake.

"This should almost be an acoustic record."

It just wasn't how we had hoped to hear ourselves.

It wasn't the right setting.

We all kind of agreed. He's a very good producer,

but it just, you know, it was a swing and a miss.

So, we kind of retreated into our corners

to figure out what to do next.

In the early '80s, their careers continued on.

Emmylou's passion still lay in roots country

and she relocated to Nashville.

# Well, it comes to he who waits, I'm told

# But I don't need it when I'm old and grey

# Yeah, I want it today... #

Linda, meanwhile, continued to prove she was a musical jukebox

with her versatility as she moved into the '80s...

# I know something about love

# You gotta want it bad If that guy's got into... #

..adding New Wave and even the Great American Songbook

to her repertoire.

# I have got a crush

# My baby, on...

# You. #

CHEERING

In 1980, Dolly's ambition had paid off.

She'd topped the charts around the world

and was even a hit in Hollywood with her new pop sound.

# I tumble outta bed and I stumble to the kitchen

# Pour myself a cup of ambition

# Yawn and stretch and try to come to life... #

I think of it as Dolly finally, like kicking the ball through the...

through the field goal. It's like she...

she had the touchdown with that one.

# ..from 9 to 5

# Workin' 9 to 5

# What a way to make a livin'

# Barely gettin' by

# It's all takin' and no givin'

# They just use your mind

# But they'll never give you credit

# It's enough to drive you

# Crazy if you let it... #

Like Dolly, in the mid-'80s,

country music was obsessed with crossover and Nashville's Music Row

was accused of being too slick and pop orientated.

# I'm going to bop with you, baby all night long

# I'm going to bop the night away... #

Through the late '70s and into the '80s,

country music went through a few boom and bust cycles.

# Hello, Detroit auto workers

# Let me thank you for your time... #

The more it becomes an entertainment type of commodity

the less, you know, true to its kind of country music roots

the music itself became.

# Hello, Pittsburgh... #

It was a time when, you know,

country music had sort of lost its identity.

# You work a 40-hour week for a livin'... #

By 1986, Dolly had acquired international stardom

and, despite their crazy schedules, the trio decided it was time

to reunite and finally make the album they wanted.

APPLAUSE AND CHEERING Yeah!

Well, look at us cowgirls! Howdy, pardners! Howdy, Dolly!

APPLAUSE CONTINUES You know... Thank you, folks.

APPLAUSE DIES DOWN

Now, this is a real big treat for me,

because everybody, since I started the show,

has wanted to know where Linda and Emmy are, because everybody kind of

thinks of us as sisters, and you finally made it.

We were all on different labels, we all had different managers,

we all were scattered to the wind, all had obligations and tours,

so we worked for years trying to pull off the first Trio album.

This past year, Linda called Emmy and me up and said,

"Let's do this album before we get so old we can't sing!"

LAUGHTER Or nobody's interested! Yeah!

So we did the album...

The friends wanted to bring back old-time mountain music just when

it was slipping out of reach, but not everybody was on board.

I don't think anybody liked the idea of three women singers,

I don't think anybody liked the idea of us being not in a niche.

It wasn't rock and roll, it wasn't country,

it wasn't this, wasn't that, it was old-timey music.

ACOUSTIC INTRO PLAYS

# Oh, the pain of loving you... #

Trio was recorded in 1986 at Complex Studios in Los Angeles,

with George Massenburg chosen as the producer

to focus on their harmonies.

The inspiration was to, as much as possible,

capture that thing that they felt in just singing together live

and comfortable and happy and just thrilled

with the sounds that came out in a very live, very small context.

The artists hand-picked some of the very best session players

to capture their stripped-back sound.

Dolly Parton, Emmylou and Linda Ronstadt

are going to sing three-part harmony and then, there's a bunch of people

that they really like to play with and I said, "Ooh, that's good!"

And you get paid too! "OK! Well, that's fine with me.

"That's just fine with me. Sign me up, sign me on."

I was a little nervous maybe. I mean, we're all kind of on edge

when you're working with people like that, you know,

you want to do it right and... HE LAUGHS

..you don't want to be the one who's going to mess up, you know.

And especially when they have... when their ideas,

their musical ideas, are pretty much better than your own, you know.

WOMAN: A poet once said that

something in a hill child dies when he goes down to level land.

The trio wanted the album

to evoke the old-timey songs of the mountains.

We were chasing more agrarian music, you know, from the times that people

really actually lived in the country and were more isolated.

GOSPEL SINGING

People sang together. The family sang together.

They were, you know, stuck on these mountains, with valleys between 'em.

GOSPEL SINGING CONTINUES

Women in Appalachia were the song savers,

were the song preservers, in the folk tradition.

They're the ones that saved the old ballads,

which are often from feminine points of view.

# I once did have a dear companion

# Indeed I called his love my own... #

I like to call it parlour music, the kind of thing that women might do

in the 19th century - when their household chores are finished,

they might have a few precious moments to sit down on the sofa

and harmonise together and sort of share your sorrows and your joys.

# ..and dreaming in some soft repose... #

'It's such a mournful song.'

The first Jean Ritchie rendition of that,

that Alan Lomax got... It's so mournful! ..it's so sad!

Yeah. And it's within that tradition of

female Appalachian songs, where they're just longing for some lover

that's never going to come back... Yeah.

..and the Trio took that and then they kind of raised it.

# Oh, have you seen my dear companion?

# For he was all this world to me... #

'There's a lot of light and hope in it. Mm-hm.

'Even with this sad lyric, you feel like it's...'

these women mourning a lover, but kind of they're together... Yeah!

..and they're going to hold each other up.

# I'd join the wild birds in their crying

# Thinking of you and your sweet face... #

'Preserving these songs... Yeah. ..and bringing them into'

a new generation that might not listen to the old things,

you know, I think that it's...

and I don't know who's doing that today.

# Oh, have you seen my dear companion?

# He was all this world to me. #

I'm very sentimental about all those songs.

Linda and Emmy had done research

on those things to find a lot of that stuff,

because they came from, like I say, a different world than I did.

I came from that place and so those songs were embedded in my psyche,

in my soul, in my heart, in my mouth, you know.

# There's a little rosewood casket

# Resting on a marble stand... #

'Of course, those are the songs that I can sing the best, I think,'

even though I like thinking I can do all kinds of stuff,

but the truth is my truest gift really is that...

that sound that really comes from the mountains,

that is so true to who I truly am and how I grew up.

# ..read them o'er for me tonight... #

We wanted to bring that part of her voice,

that part of Dolly, back into Appalachia,

and using it to our purposes too, having Dolly's voice there,

and just Dolly's presence there, made us authentic.

# Last night as I lay on the boxcar

# Just waiting for a train to pass by... #

It became clear that the magic of the Trio was what they had

discovered ten years previously - the blend of their voices.

'Dolly, Linda and Emmy all had different voices -

'decidedly different voices - but when they sang together,'

their complexities dovetailed in ways that were

at once idiosyncratic and incredibly beautiful.

# Will there be any freight trains in heaven?

# Any boxcars in which we might hide? #

They all had distinctive personalities

in their voices, qualities,

and I think that's what makes a really good, interesting blend.

If you can blend, and have your own voice and put your own stamp on it,

it's truly magical.

# Will we always have money to spare? #

There's a vibration that happens and, to me, it's very spiritual.

It's like something else enters the room. Mm-hm.

And that's like the overtone, but to me, it's just

this vibration of otherness that lifts the whole thing.

It's just an accident of nature. It's genes.

You know, how our voices combined,

they just happened to fill up parts of...

Each person filled up a part that the other person didn't have.

I think we sound like sisters. You never know.

There are those groups that are not family,

but they sound like they are, and when you can come across

that combination, you've got something really good.

CHATTER AND LAUGHTER

As the Trio all approached their 40th birthday, they chose a song

looking back to the girl groups of their teenage years

as a song dedicated to the men in their lives,

the Phil Spector song To Know Him Is To Love Him.

ALL: # To know, know, know him

# Is to love, love, love him

# Just to see him smile... #

A certain movie director was asked to direct the promo for the song.

Well, you know, it was kind of like, "We should make a music video,"

and I was going out with this guy that made films, so he could do it.

It was that way, it was very casual.

You know, I was the boyfriend,

so, you know, I was sort of like the fly on the wall,

but, you know, they would sit around and, a lot of the times,

they'd talk about the loves lost or the love for a new boyfriend,

or the new this, and all that kind of stuff, so there was a lot of that

that they actually were living and they're very romantic about it.

You know, it's... It's sort of Jane Austen-ish,

if I can, like, put that there. HE LAUGHS

# ..love, love, love him And I do... #

They are strong, brilliant women,

who had had a variety of relationships with men

and had emerged from all of these as, er, victorious.

# Why can't he see I...? #

LINDA: 'Emmy has a real heartbreak sound in her singing. It's like a...

'Like I said, like she's pleading for her life and her sanity.'

# Someday, he will see... #

'Music has always had such an effect on me.

'I think it opens up the vistas of our soul and our heart'

and our humanness, it connects us to people and makes us feel that

somehow we all, one way or another, share the same human experience.

# Those memories of you still haunt me, every night... #

Each singer has their own history and their own where they're from

and what they do and, you know, it's not just the voices.

'It's the culture behind the voices that blend and their struggles.

'You know, they all had struggles.'

ALL: # ..they lay me down

DOLLY: # In dreams of you... #

LINDA: 'Dolly has a sound like a heartbroken child, you know,

'like you've just absolutely smashed her hopes or something.'

And she's strong, she's going to carry on,

but she just has this heartbroken disappointment.

# But you're not there

# And I'm so lonesome... #

'We got very emotional ourselves many times

'when we were singing certain songs. You know, we would feel it!'

And when you get that much feeling,

I mean, if you've got any feelings at all,

it's going to kind of overflow, so that's what you hope to do.

A decade after its conception,

the acoustic country album was released and it flew in the face

of the contemporary formulaic pop produced in Nashville at the time.

There was some resistance to putting the record out at the beginning.

It was not a slam dunk. You'd think it would be, but it wasn't.

It hit Nashville like a bomb! They loathed it!

# For at least I could run They just died in the sun... #

They did play it on the radio.

We didn't know, but we believed there was a market for this.

Country was the way we pushed it. It got a lot of play, I think,

also on adult contemporary and middle of the road stations

and some, like, cool FM stations, you know.

People were listening to country music that really weren't country.

They really didn't like the twangy stuff.

You know, they didn't like the steel guitars, and this was not that.

This was real mountain music, so it was perfect, and I think we sold,

like, four million records on the dang thing!

# When a flower grows wild it can always survive

ALL: # Wildflowers don't care where they grow... #

Trio went on to win Country Music Association awards,

Academy of Country Music awards, Grammy Awards,

gold record, platinum record!

Four hit singles! It could not have been more successful. It was a...

It was a masterpiece that was a commercial success. What a concept!

After proving Nashville wrong with the success of Trio,

the three tried to regroup, but it didn't run so smoothly

and it took 13 years to release their next album.

Naturally, none of the people that were in charge of us professionally

were eager to do something that would take more time

and make less money and be more trouble,

so it was just really hard to get that happening,

but we wanted to do it, cos we liked the music.

# ..that matters

# Is the love that we share

# And the way that we care

# When we're gone

# Long gone. #

The trio stuck to its successful formula

and Trio II was eventually released in 1999,

following rumours of unharmonious struggles between the artists.

One of us may be having a single coming out, so they said,

"No, we can't put a Trio out!" It was those kind of things.

It was more things, aggravations,

brought on by other people or just things that couldn't be helped.

# And when we're gone, gone... #

But we loved each other,

and Linda and Emmy are very close, they've stayed very, very close.

# The only thing that will have mattered... #

'It didn't affect my friendship with Emmy.

'I mean, it just was a hard business thing,'

that's all, you know. There are reasons those things happen

and you just have to accept them.

Er, can we look forward to a Trio III?

Well, we'd like to. You can look forward to it.

We're looking forward to it.

And if this one does well enough for the record label to afford us

to do it, that'd make a difference too, so get out and buy this record!

We need the money. It costs a lot to look this cheap!

LAUGHTER

And, following Trio's release, there was a resurgence

and a return to country roots and old-time music.

# I am a man of constant sorrow... #

It did have influence on things like O Brother, Where Art Thou?,

which also was a breakthrough in country music.

It was so wacky!

But it was a similar kind of music that the Trio is.

It was that back to roots, the real deal stuff, you know.

And it exploded!

After our album came out, then Ricky Skaggs had a huge hit

with traditional stuff and then it became...

I think that our album really paved the road for

people like Alison Krauss later on, you know.

# Till I find my way back to my heart

# For there's no-one but me gonna take my part... #

Alison Krauss has popularised that particular traditional sound -

really soulful-sounding music - that Linda and Dolly and Emmy

were plugged into before these artists came along.

Trio III was not to be, when, in 2012, the trio realised

they could never sing together again.

When I heard that Linda had Parkinson's and she wasn't going

to be able to sing, I mean, it cut me like a knife.

It just killed me, and I can only imagine how she must feel!

# White snow

# In a deep sleep... #

This is kind of bittersweet,

because there will be some things that people have not heard before

that were recorded when she was still in her prime

and that gorgeous voice was there for all the world to share in.

# ..purple black sky... #

I think that showing Linda Ronstadt,

you know, at the height of her powers as a singer,

and in the company of these wonderful collaborators,

will remind people what a force she was.

# Oh, that boy of mine

# By my side... #

'I did so many different kinds of music, you know.'

It all came to me from the living room of the house that I grew up in,

or it came from the radio or from my sister or brother,

so it was just one of the other influences that I've absorbed.

I'm just grateful I got a chance to do it.

# Well, I'll never be blue

# My dreams come true

# On Blue Bayou. #

APPLAUSE AND CHEERING

Linda, Emmylou and Dolly were

pioneers in bringing different cultures and music together

and raising the game for women in the country tradition.

The Trio now is, er...is legendary.

You meet these young women today

that, to them, they're formative musical figures.

Whether or not they'd describe themselves as feminists,

they so absolutely and clearly were, you know, way ahead of their time

in their determination to forge their own career,

regardless of what anybody else thought they should be.

People, I think, will look back when they're studying music...

Well, you like to think those kind of things,

like, when you're gone, how will you be remembered?

But I'd like to think, like, in school, in music school,

I think people will point to that Trio

and it'll have the best of all three of us.

I'll treasure it till the day I'm gone,

which we're old enough to be any day now, but... Any day now!

Knock on wood!

# You don't knock You don't knock, you just walk on in

# The door The door to Heaven's den

# There's love There's love and joy for you

# To share To share the whole day through

# I know I know my friends are there

# To rest To rest in the Heaven's nest

# You don't knock...

# You just walk on in. #

'From the heights of the Scottish Highlands

'to the shores of East Anglia, I've travelled across Britain...'

We got a fish!

'..to learn about the food I cook for my family...'

Tell me, what is so good about these potatoes?