NEW YORK (AP) — Dolly Parton’s musical story starts further back than most might expect — to the British Isles of the 1600s. That’s where her ancestors hail from, eventually landing in the hollers of East Tennessee and its familiar mountain ranges, bringing their songs with them. A new album out Friday, “Smoky Mountain DNA: Family, Faith & Fables” credited to Dolly Parton and Family, explores the great legacy of the Partons and the Owens, her maternal family, as she performs alongside five generations of family members.
“My grandpa used to say when I got famous, he said, ‘Well, she came out crying in the key of D,’” she told The Associated Press. “I think we all did.”
“Smoky Mountain DNA” was an inevitable labor of love, one that taught Parton more about her family line.
“We’re kind of like the Carter family. We go back generations,” Parton said. (The Carters are widely considered the first family of country music.)
“I would imagine this will be my favorite album,” Parton said. “This really involves, you know, my grandmas and my grandpas, my uncles and my aunts and all the people going all the way back that had the biggest influence on my life. The ones that I remember from being little, and it even goes on farther back from there.”
Richie Owens — Parton’s cousin, who she describes as “the family historian” — produced “Smoky Mountain DNA.” He says that the family has long been archivists, but the idea to curate a record started around 2010 and 2011, delayed by a few deaths. Then, right before the pandemic, Parton approached Owens and said, “we need to get together and start trying to get all this information (and) material together,” he recalls. Because Owens had already been working on a family story, specifically tied to his grandfather’s fiddle, they teamed up for what is now “Smoky Mountain DNA.”
For some of the new songs, Owens utilized digital technology — what he compares to the AI-assist on the last new Beatles song,…