Coat of Many Colors

Ten songs, and nothing within any of them is padded; no song outstays itself, so the subtractive test bites across the sequence instead. The title song is the reason the record exists and could not go. “Traveling Man” is required in a lesser way: its comic turn, a lover lost to the singer’s own mother, gives the record a second register after the opening’s tenderness. “My Blue Tears” and “Here I Am” each carry a part of the voice the record is built on, solitude and the offered self. The two Wagoner songs and one or two of the thinner songs on side two are permitted rather than compelled: the customary complement of the Nashville LP. The cap is cleared by a tenth.

Score: 7.6 / 10

The disclosure can be stated and holds: worth is made by love and labour, not conferred by the market or the crowd, and a child can know this against the mockery of other children. The coat is sewn from “a box of rags”; the mother tells the story of Joseph as she sews; the schoolmates laugh; the child holds that she was rich. Poverty is shown from inside, without complaint and without sentiment about poverty itself, and the plain, unforced vocal is the child’s certainty, so that sound carries the meaning as fully as the words. Held below the gate by the rest of the record, which discloses less: a comic tale, a mood finely held, convention.

Score: 7.9 / 10

Elevation is warm and comes several times, always of one narrow kind, beauty and tenderness. The title song rises by plainness: a narrative ballad that never lifts its voice and reaches its height where the mockery is answered and the memory becomes conviction. “My Blue Tears” reaches the high lonesome register of the mountain tradition, the voice alone and bright over spare accompaniment, a real height. “Here I Am” rises as a song of self-offering, and “A Better Place to Live” closes with a hymn-like reach. Against this, “Traveling Man” has energy rather than height, several songs stay level, and the arrangement of the day sometimes cushions a rise that a barer setting would let climb.

Score: 7.7 / 10

In the title song myth is built, not evoked. The coat of many colours is Joseph’s, from Genesis 37, named in the song through the mother’s telling, and the pattern is load-bearing: the garment made in love marks the beloved child and draws the scorn of the others, and the child holds to the gift. Joseph’s coat is played out in a schoolyard in the Smoky Mountains, and the particular stays particular: the rags, the mother, the needle, the laughter. The rest of the record evokes more than it builds: the trickster lover and the mother as rival, the abandoned woman, the promised land as hope. One song in ten bears weight as myth, which holds the album below the gate.

Score: 7.8 / 10

The inheritance is the Nashville country album of 1971: a strong title song, a set of songs around it, the production of the label’s roster, and for Parton the partnership with Porter Wagoner, whose two songs sit on the record. The turn is of degree and real: a woman writing most of the record from her own life and region, the title song an autobiography told with no irony and no apology, when Nashville’s women more often sang others’ songs. What holds the axis among the lowest of the eleven is the stake and the precedent. Loretta Lynn’s “Coal Miner’s Daughter” (1970) had made the autobiographical song of Appalachian poverty a hit a year before, and the record risked nothing in its manner.

Score: 7.2 / 10

The sequence is counted here, once, and it holds the axis among the lowest of the eleven. Within the title song form is knowledge: a strophic narrative ballad, verse by verse from memory to schoolyard to conviction, in which the plain return of the frame is the child’s steadiness; set it in another form and the song stops knowing its calm. “My Blue Tears” depends in the same way on its bareness. At the level of the album the form is the customary one. The title song leads; “A Better Place to Live” closes on hope, placed with some intent; between them the order serves rather than enacts, and the two Wagoner songs, set together at the end of side one, read as accommodation more than design.

Score: 7.2 / 10

Evidence over fifty-five years, much of it concentrated on one song. The title song has been returned to continuously: sung by Parton across her career, taught and anthologised as a model of the narrative country song, and read again in each generation for what it says about class, Appalachia, mothers and girlhood. It keeps yielding because its plainness invites rereading. The album has a second life as the most admired of Parton’s early records, returned to by critics and by listeners who come to it backward from her fame. Against this, half the record yields little more on return than on first hearing, and the attention paid to the album as a whole is steady rather than deep.

Score: 7.5 / 10

The field is the country album of the early 1970s, beside Loretta Lynn, Merle Haggard, Kris Kristofferson and Tammy Wynette. The intrinsic force is modest to moderate. The record does not reorganise what a country album could be; it is a superb singer-songwriter’s record in the existing form, and its distinction is the title song’s plain autobiography and a woman’s authority as a writer. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the title song became a model of the autobiographical country song and of the woman songwriter who tells her own origins, a line that runs through later country and Americana writing, and it established Parton as a writer of standing apart from the duo with Wagoner. The album as an album was not a model others followed.

Score: 7.5 / 10

Survival is weighed over fifty-five years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives as issued and has stayed in print and been reissued. The title song’s presence is of the widest kind, sung, broadcast and taught continuously for five decades; the album’s is narrower, heard whole chiefly by those who come to it as Parton’s best early record, and since the song’s presence is not the album’s, that narrowness is charged. The fabric is largely sound: a band record of acoustic and electric instruments ages less than synthesiser pop, though the Nashville backing places it in its year. Blue, of the same year and heard whole and widely, holds 8.9 here.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Command of the recorded medium, the words weighed elsewhere. Parton’s singing is the load-bearing craft: exact pitch, the mountain vibrato used as colour, a plain delivery in the title song that never presses the sentiment, and the bright high voice of “My Blue Tears”. The songs are well built: the title song’s melody carries a long narrative without strain, and “Traveling Man” is deftly paced. The session playing is clean and assured, the production clear. What holds the axis is the setting. Ferguson’s production is the competent house manner of RCA Nashville, the arrangements generic in places, the backing a cushion more than a construction, and the Wagoner songs routine. The making is load-bearing in one voice, not throughout.

Score: 8.0 / 10

One law roughly governs the record: a mountain woman’s voice telling the truth plainly, in tenderness, comedy, loneliness and hope. Take the two most distant elements, “Traveling Man”, a comic tale of a mother who runs off with her daughter’s lover, and “A Better Place to Live”, an earnest, hymn-like plea. They obey the same law at the level of the voice, which carries one candour through both, and the range from comedy to the sacred is wider than many country records of the year attempt. But the Wagoner songs speak in another writer’s manner, darker and more rhetorical, and the side-two songs around them obey the genre’s conventions more than the record’s own physics. The law holds through the singer more than through the songs.

Score: 7.5 / 10

Judged on what the record holds. The title song alone integrates several orders in one structure of a few minutes: the family, in the mother; labour and poverty, in a coat made by hand from rags; the community and its judgment, in the schoolchildren; the sacred, in the Bible story told as she sews; and the consciousness of a child who holds her own valuation against theirs. Across the album further orders appear track by track: the couple and its betrayals, madness in “If I Lose My Mind”, the natural world in “Early Morning Breeze”, a social hope in “A Better Place to Live”. What holds the axis lowest is that these are added more than joined, and the state and history are absent.

Score: 7.0 / 10