Don’t Stay Up Too Late.

Dolly Parton, Touch Your Woman

File Between: Loretta Lynn and Emmylou Harris

Comments: It’s kind of astonishing that this record hasn’t been reissued on CD. There’s not a bad track on it. A couple of inessential ones, sure; she was cranking out records at a rate of four a year, counting duets, at this point. Woman’s only human. But that crystal, early-morning voice covers a host of cornpone and cliché, and the production is slick without being personality-free — her Appalachian roots show through strong. Two tragic story-songs, a couple of straight-faced double entendre songs (or, in the case of the title track, single entendre), some poor-but-proud hoedowns, and a sprinkling of feather-light love songs, mostly written by Parton herself or by her duetting partner Porter Wagoner — Parton’s records from this era have a reputation of being hit singles surrounded by a cloud of off-the-shelf filler, but this is strong all the way through, and at ten songs at roughly 2:30 each, doesn’t wear out its welcome. In a lot of ways this is the kind of record Emmylou Harris would be trying to make a couple years later, only not so studied and self-consciously tasteful.

A Keeper? Dolly’s early discography is generally pretty cheap at the used-record mausoleums I haunt; I’ll have to pick up a bunch more.

Vinyl Rip: A Lot Of You Left In Me

Roger Whittaker, Loose And Fiery

File Between: Paul Anka and Rod McKuen

Comments: I don’t hate music easily. There’s at least a theoretical good in everything, and especially with music that has moved a lot of units it’s often a game for me to figure out what it is that the original audience heard and loved in it and see if I can get into that same headspace, if I can inhabit the universe in which the music is good. But Roger Whittaker, the honey-voiced South African purveyor of slick pap to grannies and elevator inhabitants, defeated me. I can’t say I hated this record, exactly — sitting through it was certainly less viscerally unpleasant than any number of extreme noise/experimental works I’ve subjected myself to — but it was about as bad as pretty music played and sung in tune can be. The title of the record seems to mean nothing at all — it certainly has no relation to what’s in the grooves. Milquetoasty covers of “Fire And Rain,” “Scarborough Fair,” “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling,” and “By The Time I Get To Phoenix,” delivered in a burnished, antiseptic baritone that offers no sign of having meant, or even understood, a word of it, are interspersed with songs that aren’t familiar to me (though a quick check of the credits suggests they aren’t originals), but are, if possible, even more bland. The song I pulled, an adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s terrible, terrible poem “If,” is at least a minor masterwork of unintentional camp, as interesting for the time-capsule quality of its generic production as for its anachronistic cheerleading of Empire-builders.

A Keeper? If I’d paid more than a dollar for it, I might be upset. But finding out that no, I don’t need to investigate Roger Whittaker’s discography any further is worth a buck.

Vinyl Rip: A Song For Erik