Lexington church’s annual tribute concert goes country with Dolly Parton

Organizers behind the annual tribute benefit concerts presented at First Presbyterian Church knew what direction they wanted to take for this year’s performance. When deciding on which nationally known artist whose music was to be featured, they were determined to respect diversity in gender and race.

That’s how they, pardon the pun, said hello to Dolly.

To the concert series that has brought a team of Lexington artists together to perform the songs of Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, John Lennon and, in 2021, Stevie Wonder, add the name of Dolly Parton. The music of the veteran country/pop song stylist and philanthropist will be featured this weekend as part of a continuing collaboration between the locally based Purple Carrot Productions and First Presbyterian’s Music for Mission series.

“We keep a short list of artists that we consider each year for a tribute,” said Marlon Hurst, Director of Music and Arts at First Presbyterian. “We want to have a mix of gender and race. This is our sixth tribute, but the only other woman so far we’ve paid tribute to has been Joni Mitchell. We were really looking to pay tribute to a woman this year, so that narrows the field a little bit. Dolly was on that list.

“While she’s a white Southern woman, she is pretty plain spoken about her egalitarian approach to humanity. There’s a broader appeal than just to a white Southern demographic. She’s kind of having a moment culturally now and we thought this was a good time. We also haven’t paid tribute to anybody who is primarily a country artist. That made her that much more appealing.”

Tickets for the Dolly Parton Tribute are free. But as with all other concerts presented in First Presbyterian’s Music for Mission series, audiences will be asked to donate during the show to a designated Lexington organization. This year’s beneficiary will be Seedleaf, a Lexington non-profit promoting gardening, horticultural training and small-scale farming in urban environments.

The community nature of the Music for Mission concerts – in terms how they are organized, who performs at them and the organizations that benefit – have made the series quite popular, even when shows have been presented on evenings when numerous alternate event choices were available. Its 2019 Bob Dylan tribute concert had the very unplanned occasion of being presented the same evening Dylan himself was playing at Northern Kentucky University.

“We had an oboe recital here with Titus Underwood from the Nashville Symphony on a Friday night (Oct. 14) when Keeneland was running and Big Blue Madness was happening. We had 100 people in the room. We pulled 100 people on a Friday night for an oboe/piano recital. That wouldn’t have happened without collaboration.”

Collaboration means teaming Music for Mission with several other local performing arts organizations. The Underwood concert was presented in association with the Chamber Music Society of Central Kentucky. A May 12, 2023, concert featuring trumpeter Marquis Hill and percussionist Joel Ross brings Music for Mission together with the Origins Jazz Series. This weekend’s Dolly Parton Tribute continues a collaboration with organizer Anita Courtney and her Purple Carrot Productions, which began the annual tribute shows with a 2017 concert devoted to local performances of Leonard Cohen songs.

“When this happens. more people show up, and when more people show up, we raise more awareness and we raise more money for our outreach partners,” Hurst said. “In this case, that will be Seedleaf. It’s a win-win.”

There is another important consideration in choosing which artist is spotlighted in the yearly tribute shows – a sense of performance variety and adaptability within the selected music.

“One of the things we try to think about when we’re choosing an artist is how accessible their music is to artists who will cover their tunes, how malleable their music is so that people could make it their own. Prince stays on our list every year, but we kind of feel like, ‘Who can perform Prince really well besides Prince?’ It’s just not as accessible as music that maybe has some roots in the folk tradition. Particularly folk-rooted music has the capacity to receive a variety of treatments and interpretations. The acoustics at First Presbyterian and the aesthetic work really well for something like this because it provides an opportunity for people to be quiet to focus and listen.”

In expressing the stylistic breadth of Parton’s songs, this weekend’s concert will have Alicia McCorvey teaming with pianist Raleigh Dailey for the epic “I Will Always Love You,” the ensemble Nevi’im presenting songs from Parton’s famed “Trio” records with Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris and the Rockhouse Old Time String Band playing some of her early country-roots songs.

This year’s tribute also adds something new to the program: an emcee. Hosting duties will be provided by musicologist Ron Pen, professor emeritus at the University of Kentucky and former director of the John Jacob Niles Center for American Music. Pen will also perform as part of the Rockhouse String Band.

“I’m a slow learner,” Hurst said. “What we realized last year with the Stevie Wonder tribute was that the performers’ set changes were more involved. There ended up being quite a bit of lag time in between sets, so attention drifted from what was happening onstage during the performance to what wasn’t happening on the stage in-between the performers. And I thought, ‘We need an emcee to help bridge the gap between performances.’ So when we were thinking about that this year and who might be a right person for this, we thought, ‘Ron Pen would do this wonderfully if he would be available.’ And he is and he’s going to do it and we’re delighted.

“All of us play to each other’s strengths at these concerts, so they’re just fun to do. It’s a lot of work, but it’s fun and it’s rewarding. I think if it stops being fun, we’ll not do them anymore.”

Dolly Parton Tribute Concert

When: 7:30 a.m. Nov. 4

Where: First Presbyterian Church, 171 Market St.

Admission: Free, but tickets are required. Donations will be collected as part of the Music for Mission series for Seedleaf.

Online: For tickets and more information, go to fpclex.org/M4M.