During the mid-1970s, Joni Mitchell played her 1975 album Hissing of Summer Lawns for Dolly Parton and got an unexpected response from the country legend, who was awestruck by Mitchell’s lyrics and her storytelling.
“[Dolly] said to me quite shyly after the record was played back, ‘My God, if I thought that deep, I’d scare myself to death,’” recalled Mitchell in a 1988 interview. Mitchell wasn’t offended by Parton’s reaction. Kris Kristofferson had a similar one when she played her 1971 album Blue for him. “God, Joan, save something of yourself,” Mitchell recalled him saying to her.
“In order to write poetry, it’s an introspective process,” said Mitchell. “Some of the process is indeed a little bit scary, you know.”
But regardless of Parton’s initial reaction, she wasn’t hesitant to cover two of Mitchell’s earlier classics throughout the years.
“The Circle Game” (1976)
In 1976, Dolly Parton hosted her own variety show out of Nashville, Dolly!, and had one of her first collaborations with her Trio bandmates, Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris, more than a decade before they would release their debut together. During one episode, all three performed Mitchell’s “The Circle Game.”
Released on Mitchell’s 1970 album Ladies of the Canyon, “The Circle Game” was inspired by her friend Neil Young as a message of hope, while he was going through a transformative time when he was 21, reflecting on the loss of his youth. Though Parton performed the song on her show, she never officially released a recorded version of the Mitchell classic.
“Both Sides, Now” (2005)
Parton’s 2005 album Those Were the Days is a collection of covers, including Kris Kristofferson’s “Me and Bobby McGhee,” Tommy James and the Shondells’ “Crimson and Clover,” John Lennon’s “Imagine,” Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” and more.
The album also features another Mitchell classic, “Both Sides, Now,” originally released on her 1966 live album Joni Mitchell: Live at the Second Fret 1966. The song was inspired by a passage Mitchell read in Saul Bellow’s 1959 novel Henderson the Rain King. “I was reading ‘Henderson the Rain King’ on a plane, and early in the book, Henderson is also up in a plane,” recalled Mitchell of the song. “He’s on his way to Africa, and he looks down and sees these clouds. I put down the book, looked out the window, and saw clouds too, and I immediately started writing the song. I had no idea that the song would become as popular as it did.”
On Parton’s 2005 rendition of “Both Sides, Now,” she’s joined by bluegrass artist Rhonda Vincent and Judy Collins, who first recorded the Mitchell song in 1967.
