Dolly Parton Goes Disco: The Story of Baby I’m Burnin’

The Twelve Inch 225 - The A Side (Extended) : Baby I’m Burning (Dolly Parton)

I was never much into Dolly Parton.

Or maybe I should say I was never much into country music, which probably won’t surprise you if you’ve been following my story for a while. 😁

And yet, when I restarted collecting twelve inches a few years ago, Baby I’m Burnin’ was on my initial shortlist. I had never bought the twelve inch when it originally came out. It wasn’t a big hit in the Benelux and, back then, I certainly didn’t consider Dolly Parton a disco artist.

So why was it on that list?

Because I’ve always been fascinated by that strange moment in the late seventies when seemingly everybody decided they needed a disco record. Rock stars did it. Pop stars did it. And, as it turns out, country stars did it too.

But there was something different about Dolly.

Everybody needs a disco record

Some of the “disco excursions” ended rather badly. Rod Stewart had Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?. The Beach Boys gave us the disco remake of Here Comes the Night. There are plenty of examples where the record sounded so far removed from what the artist normally did that fans reacted as if somebody had broken into the studio and replaced their favourite band overnight. And afterwards, some of those artists weren’t exactly eager to talk about their disco period.

Dolly Parton never had that problem with Baby I’m Burnin’.

She clearly didn’t consider it some unfortunate blip in her seventies career. Quite the opposite. She continued performing the song and even used it as a concert opener long after its chart run was over. Years later, it even became part of the opening theme of her 1987 television show.

That already tells you something.

When the news of Dolly’s passing came a few weeks ago and all the retrospectives started appearing, I found myself reading more about her. Not only about Dolly Parton the artist, but about the human being behind the artist. And I kept coming back to Baby I’m Burnin’.

Not because everybody was writing about it.

No, because almost nobody was.

With a career like Dolly’s, you have Jolene, I Will Always Love You, 9 to 5 and dozens of other obvious places to start. You don’t need to zoom in on the disco record.

But you know me by now.

Of course I’m going to zoom in on the disco record. 😁

Especially because I think Baby I’m Burnin’ tells us quite a lot about Dolly Parton.

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Dolly wants more

We don’t need another ten-minute biography of Dolly here. There have been plenty excellent ones being written & published this past few weeks. So, let’s jump straight to the second half of the seventies.

By then Dolly had already built a hugely successful country career. Between 1974 and 1980 she scored one country hit after another, including a remarkable string of number ones. But what do you do when you are entrepreneurial by nature and have reached the top of your field? You start looking at the field next door.

Dolly wanted the pop audience.

Her 1977 album New Harvest...First Gathering, which she produced herself, was already part of that move, but it didn’t produce the pop breakthrough she wanted. For the next album she turned to producer Gary Klein, who had already helped Glen Campbell cross from country into the mainstream.

The result was Here You Come Again.

Its title track became Dolly’s first Top 5 hit on the Billboard Hot 100.

Mission accomplished….

Or rather, mission started.

Klein stayed for 1978’s Heartbreaker, and the timing of that album is important. It was recorded while disco was everywhere. Saturday Night Fever had turned a club culture into a worldwide pop phenomenon. The soundtrack and its singles dominated the charts, and suddenly the dancefloor mattered to record companies almost as much as radio.

Heartbreaker certainly isn’t a disco album.

But you can hear 1978 in it.

Moving with the times

Dolly herself was quite open about what she was doing. Country music, she said, remained her first love, but times changed and music moved on. She didn’t want to be left behind.

And that may be the key to understanding Baby I’m Burnin’.

For some rock and pop artists, making a disco record meant suddenly doing something that didn’t really fit. Dolly, on the other hand, was already changing. She was deliberately crossing into pop, so disco wasn’t a sudden U-turn. It was simply another road available to her.

And she genuinely seemed fascinated by what was happening.

Dolly even spent the occasional night at Studio 54. Not that you would necessarily have found her in the middle of the dancefloor.

“Everybody was dancing. I didn’t. I just liked watching, sitting there and being part of the whole scene. I’d just sit on the couch and talk to Andy Warhol. My friend Sandy Gallin, my gay manager, would get me out there every once in a while to dance a little with him. But I mostly just loved the commotion and the excitement and the thrill of that whole scene. It was the hottest thing going at the time.”

I love that image.

Dolly Parton and Andy Warhol sitting together at Studio 54, basically people-watching. Two people who understood better than most that creating an image doesn’t necessarily mean hiding who you really are.

Dance With Dolly

And then RCA went one step further.

They released a twelve inch.

Not merely Baby I’m Burnin’, but Dance With Dolly.

Now you have my attention 😁

The A-side contained a 4:31 disco mix of Baby I’m Burnin’. On the other side was a 5:18 disco mix of another Heartbreaker track, I Wanna Fall in Love. Both were remixed by Al Garrison and Warren Schatz, who had done some other (disco) productions for RCA like Vicky Sue Robinson

This was no longer simply Dolly making a pop record with a dance beat. RCA was packaging Dolly for DJs.

But listen to the twelve inch and something interesting happens. It isn’t some enormous transformation. The remix doesn’t suddenly turn Dolly into Donna. The basic character of the song remains intact. The intro and the break give you a little more room, and that’s basically it. At 4:31 it isn’t exactly generous either.

As a DJ, you had better get your next record ready. 😁

But perhaps that is precisely why it works. They didn’t remove Dolly from Baby I’m Burnin’ to make it acceptable to disco. They simply gave DJs enough to work with. The clubs responded. The disco mix reached No. 15 on Billboard’s dance chart.

I still wonder where it was actually played. I can easily imagine it on the more commercial dancefloors. Whether David Mancuso or Nicky Siano were desperately waiting for the new Dolly Parton twelve inch is another question. 😁

But No. 15 means somebody was playing it.

The critics versus the audience

Not everybody loved Dolly’s crossover though. Some critics were particularly hard on Heartbreaker, seeing the increasingly polished mainstream production as evidence that Dolly was moving away from what had made her special. And as you could have expected: Country purists weren’t exactly enthusiastic either.

But then you look at what the audience actually did.

Heartbreaker spent nine consecutive weeks at No. 1 on Billboard’s country album chart and went Gold.

The single release was particularly clever. RCA effectively had two Dollys on the same record. Baby I’m Burnin’ was aimed at pop, while I Really Got the Feeling serviced country radio. The latter reached No. 1 on Billboard’s country chart. Baby I’m Burnin’ reached No. 25 on the Hot 100.

And the disco mix reached No. 15 on the dance chart.

Country Dolly. Pop Dolly. Disco Dolly.

All at the same time.

In 1978 the Country Music Association named her Entertainer of the Year. So much for destroying your country career by going disco!

Why did Dolly get away with it?

That is the question that interests me most.

Maybe “get away with it” is already the wrong expression.

Dolly didn’t apologise for liking pop music. She didn’t pretend to become a disco artist. And she didn’t tell her country audience that the music they loved was suddenly beneath her.

She simply built another bridge.

There was also nothing accidental about the crossover. Dolly later talked openly about assembling the best management and publicity team she could find because she wanted people beyond country music to know who she was. And she was refreshingly straightforward about the business side too.

If crossing over allowed her to reach more people and make more money, why wouldn’t she do it?

No tortured explanation about artistic evolution. It was music, but it was also her business.

What if Dolly had been six months later?

Timing always matters. Imagine Baby I’m Burnin’ arriving six or nine months later, when the disco backlash was gathering force in America.

Would we remember it differently?

Maybe.

But I suspect Dolly would still have survived it perfectly well. Partly because Baby I’m Burnin’ never sounds like a desperate attempt to become somebody else. But mostly because Dolly understood something that many artists never do.

You don’t have to burn one bridge to build another.

She could love country and be curious about disco. She could sit at Studio 54 with Andy Warhol and still be Dolly Parton from Tennessee. One didn’t invalidate the other.

Decades later she was still doing exactly the same thing.

While researching this story I ended up watching the video for Faith, her 2019 collaboration with Galantis and Mr. Probz.

There she was again.

Dolly in electronic dance music.

Having fun.

I may never have been a Dolly Parton fan in the traditional sense, but I always respected her. And her passing touched me more than I expected.

Maybe now I understand a little better why.

Baby I’m Burnin’ is nowhere near the most important record she made. But sometimes the smaller records tell you more. And this particular twelve inch tells us about an artist who was curious enough to keep moving, clever enough to understand the business she was in and secure enough in herself not to worry too much about which box people wanted to put her in.

And that brings me to another question.

🎁 B-Side, Going Deeper Into The Groove

Was Dolly really the only country star who looked across the room at the disco dancefloor and thought: I want some of that?

Oh no.

Not even close.

That’s where we’re going on the B-Side.

And while we’re there, we might as well find out what happened to all those rock and pop stars who suddenly discovered four-on-the-floor.

Some survived the experience rather better than others. 😁

Over To You!

What do you think of Baby I’m Burnin’? Genuine Dolly classic, clever crossover, or simply Dolly’s obligatory disco record?

And which artist made the most unlikely disco record of the late seventies?

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