There have been many, many
Dolly Parton
compilations over the years, but
RCA
/
Legacy
's 2005 set
The Essential Dolly Parton
is one of the handful that gets it right. Spanning two discs and 37 tracks, this set covers her entire career, from her 1967 debut,
Hello, I'm Dolly
, to her 2001
bluegrass
comeback album,
Little Sparrow
, but the bulk of this set concentrates on her hitmaking years for
in the '70s and '80s. Since
Dolly
had so many hits, not all of them can be included even on a double-disc collection, but this does a tremendous job of picking the biggest and the best of them. Roughly, the first disc covers her first decade of recording, including a healthy dose of her inventive
country-folk
material from the early '70s, while the second disc covers her slicker crossover hits from the '80s. Dividing her material in this fashion makes each disc consistent within itself, and helps make this a more listenable set than such similar career-spanning collections as 1993's
The RCA Years
. While
Raven
's excellent
Mission Chapel Memories: 1971-1975
documents her most creative period more effectively, this tells the story of her entire career, and it's the best of its kind of compilation yet assembled. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine