Coat of Many Colors is the eighth solo studio album by Dolly Parton, released in 1971 by RCA Records. The title song, which Parton has described as her favourite of all the songs she's ever written, deals with the poverty of her childhood. It reached #4 on the U.S. country singles charts.
Over the years, Parton would re-record a number of the songs from the album. She redid "Traveling Man" (not to be confused with the Ricky Nelson song of the same name), a song that involved an unusual love triangle between a travelling salesman, a woman, and her mother, for inclusion on her 1973 album Bubbling Over. She would also re-record her composition "My Blue Tears", an "old-timey" folk-influenced song, with Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstadt in the mid-1970s, for an ill-fated Trio album project. (The recording would eventually surface on Ronstadt's 1982 album Get Closer). Parton cut the song for a third time in 2001, including it on her Little Sparrow album. "Early Morning Breeze" later appeared on her 1974 Jolene album.
"A Better Place to Live" was a song very much of its time, dealing with living in a utopian, peaceful world where people love one another, and was very much in the same vein as Jackie DeShannon's recent hit "Put a Little Love in Your Heart" (which Parton herself would later cover in 1993).
In 2001, the album was released on CD in 2001 as Joshua & Coat Of Many Colors, attached to Joshua on one disc.
In 2003, the album was ranked number 299 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. It subsequently made Time Magazine's 100 Greatest Albums of All Time in 2006.
A re-issue released in 2007, in conjunction with Parton's 2007 European Tour, featured previously unreleased songs.
In 2010, Sony Music reissued the 2007 CD Coat of Many Colors in a triple-feature CD set with My Tennessee Mountain Home and Jolene.
Read more about Coat Of Many Colors: Track Listing, Personnel
Famous quotes containing the words coat of, coat and/or colors:
“Commit a crime and the world is made of glass. Commit a crime, and it seems as if a coat of snow fell on the ground, such as reveals in the woods the track of every partridge and fox and squirrel and mole.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Americans living in Latin American countries are often more snobbish than the Latins themselves. The typical American has quite a bit of money by Latin American standards, and he rarely sees a countryman who doesn’t. An American businessman who would think nothing of being seen in a sport shirt on the streets of his home town will be shocked and offended at a suggestion that he appear in Rio de Janeiro, for instance, in anything but a coat and tie.”
—Hunter S. Thompson (b. 1939)
“The butterfly’s attractiveness derives not only from colors and symmetry: deeper motives contribute to it. We would not think them so beautiful if they did not fly, or if they flew straight and briskly like bees, or if they stung, or above all if they did not enact the perturbing mystery of metamorphosis: the latter assumes in our eyes the value of a badly decoded message, a symbol, a sign.”
—Primo Levi (1919–1987)