(RCA, 1970) Dolly returns to her high school to perform a concert for her home town and recalls her days as a radio child performer, and revives her early Monument singles, and cranks up to fellowship. As her songwriting, amusement park, and every interview ever has proven, Dolly appreciates her Tennessee mountain hometown, and the mountainfolk return the love tenfold. But for all the love they show their native daughter, they really appreciate acknowledgement from a famous outsider, so when special guest Porter Waggoner plays to the crowd by dropping local references to "Frog Alley" and "Boogertown" the crowd loses their shit! Dolly does two songs to traumatize the kids on here. The best of her (many!) child death songs "Jeannie's Afraid of the Dark" appears, with Porter adding ominous oration, and she introduces a less brutal, adorable talk-song about being terrified into bedwetting by tales of "Bloody Bones." No one connects with an audience like Dolly, but put her with her classmates and bullies and kinfolk and townspeople and you get some real magic. The crowd is more serene than the howling teenyboppers on the Jackson Five "Going Back to Indiana" album, but the love they have for their hometown hero is just as deep, or deeper. And the Frog Alley jokes are way more plentiful.
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