Dolly Parton: Treasures

Dolly Parton's "Treasures" album was filled with an assortment of covers of popular songs. For the promotional TV special, they amassed a collection of interviews with the original singers and songwriters and interspersed it with historical clips.

The special has many things going against it, most notably the short running time, which is marred by clunky editorial choices. Studio footage is blended with seemingly-live performances in which Ms. Parton is lip-syncing to the album tracks, and she comments on each of the songs that she... ahem... performs.

So it's a music video commercial... but wait, it's also a documentary! Not only do we get interviews with composers (such as Kris Kristofferson, who's superimposed into one of Dolly's video segments in a truly bizarre manner!), but at random times we cut away to historical footage from the days when the songs were originally hits. That's right, we now interrupt this Dolly Parton lip-sync performance to show you something completely random.

The ideas behind this special were kinda awesome, and if they'd had a 2-hour timeslot it could have worked well, but at under an hour, they fell short in the execution.

This is a great program which showcases Dolly in concert singing some of her favourite songs with clips of events that were going on in the world during the time when the songs were originally released. Also included are interviews with the writers of the songs and original artists such as Cat Stevens, Mac Davis, Kenny Rogers and includes performances with Alison Krauss, Suzanne Cox, David Hegaldo (Los Lobos), Raul Malo (Mavericks) and Ladysmith Black Mombazo.

Dolly Parton is a world class singer/songwriter and a hell of a live performer (as proven on the album ´Heartsongs´). So why did she choose to lip sync on this ´Treasures´ special? The songs are great, the costumes are hilarious! But live vocals would have made all the difference. This could have been a classic Dolly Parton performance, instead it´s a commercial for a very nice Dolly Parton album. Shame.