Dolly Parton hasn’t spent too much time with Bob Dylan, but she once considered recording an album of his greatest hits. Parton said she already knew what she would call the album, but it never came to fruition. The way he reacted to another one of her songs
Dolly Parton considered making an album of Bob Dylan covers
Parton has covered three of Dylan’s songs in her career. She wanted him to appear on her cover of “Blowin’ In the Wind,” but he turned her down.
“To be fair, I didn’t actually speak to him personally,” Parton told the Irish Examiner. “I’d sent a message to him because I wanted him to say at least one line on ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’. I got the message back that he didn’t want to do it, so I got (country group) Nickel Creek… to sing on it, so, in a way, it worked out better.”
She’d initially wanted to cover an entire album’s worth of his songs, but decided not to after he turned her down for the song.
“I was going to do a whole album of his (songs), and I was going to call it Dolly Does Dylan,” she said. “Now I’m having second thoughts.”
Dolly Parton said she thought Bob Dylan was a strange man
Parton may like Dylan’s music, but she’s not as sure about him as a person. She hasn’t been able to
“I’ve met him a few times but I never felt any warmth from him to me,” she told the Daily Mail. “I think I have offended him somehow by the way I looked or the way I was. I love his music but he’s a weird buckaroo.”
She recently released an album of covers
While Parton never released an album of Dylan’s songs, she has covered a number of other artists. She recently released the album Rock Star, on which she collaborated with classic rock artists.
“So I just sent them a love note through their managers, and I just said what I was doing,” she told NPR, adding, “And I said, I didn’t want to put you on the spot, but I’d love to have you sing with me on my rock album. And if you’re interested, call me at this number. And all the people I reached out to said, yes, we’d love to, and I was very honored and very proud and very humbled by that.”
Her husband, Carl Dean, appreciated the effort to record classic rock. This was his favorite genre.
“I mean, that’s always been his favorite music ever, and I’ve heard that all through the years we’ve been together — 60 years come this spring,” she said. “But when I told him — I said, well, I’ve recorded my rock album. There’s 30 songs. He said, 30 songs. And then when it was all over, he said, well, I have to say that’s pretty damn good. So for him to say that would be like somebody else jumping up and down, you know, with pompoms. That was all I needed to hear because I knew he liked it.”
