Dolly's Nov. 20 Showcase Artist interview with host Patty Loveless:

Video clips shown were "The River Unbroken," "Honky Tonk Songs," "Just Because I'm a Woman" (apparently from The Porter Wagoner Show), "Love is Strange," (with Kenny Rogers), "He's Alive" (1991 CMA Awards performance; only full video shown), and "Light of a Clear Blue Morning" (over the closing credits). Interviewed were Holly Dunn (who said it was thrilling the first time she saw Dolly, coming out of a limousine in front of RCA; she also said Dolly "is all of God's greatest blessings" put into one body) and Ricky Scaggs; plus Dabney Coleman and Loveless were shown during the closing credits.

Some of the items Dolly discussed included the following:

* She talked of the first time she "took to" her guitar as a means of getting away from the chaotic and noisy surroundings of her family and a way to create her own world where she got all the attention and love she needed because that was something impossible for her parents to give with 12 children. However, she said when she left home she missed all of them and cried herself to sleep many nights after first coming to Nashville because she missed the children, the noise, even getting peed on.

* She said she has many guitars and that she feels naked if she doesn't have a guitar, pad and pencil, and tape recorder nearby to write songs. She said she is at an age where she needs reading glasses and continually loses them, so she goes into a drug store and buys 15 or so and keeps them all over her house. She said she buys guitars the same way, going to a music store and buying several $200-$250 guitars at one time and keeping them all over her house so she can get to them to write.

* She spoke of how fortunate she is to have a wide audience from children to teens to older people and that she likes to think they see in her a part of themselves because, overall, we are no different from one another deep down inside. She says she thinks they like her honesty and telling it like-it-is, adding that someone too shy to say it wishes they said something she said and those loud enough to say it would have said the same thing if they had been on stage. She also said everyone who knows her knows where they stand with her, explaining, "If I don't like where you got it, I can sure tell you where to put it." She added that such speaking of her mind leaves her often misunderstood.

* She spoke of her 32-year marriage (34-year relationship) with Carl Dean, adding that the key to a long relationship is staying gone from each other as much as possible. She said she and Carl have different careers, different major interests, but they enjoy the same simple things when alone, such as walks in the country, seeing the wilderness in their camper, sitting by a river bank. She also said that, as she has heard others together as long as they have been say, their roles have reversed, where when they first met she was constantly talking up a storm while he was quiet and shy, he's now the one doing all the talking at home while she is quiet.

* She held up several of her early album covers, talking about them. On Just Because I'm a Woman (1968), she noted this was her first solo RCA album and that she wrote the title song as a response to Carl about seven months after they married when he asked if he was her first, and she told him the truth that he wasn't, and he was very hurt by that, so she wrote, "My mistakes are no worse than yours just because I'm a woman." She called it the first women's lib song. She held up Blue Ridge Mountain Boy (1969), confirming that the man in the corner of the photograph is Carl. She laughed when she held up Fairest of Them All (1970), saying it was about the funniest cover she ever made, with the largest collar she could find and her thought of what a fairy tale character should have looked then; although she added that it did have some good songs on it. (This was the album which included "Down from Dover," "Daddy Come and Get Me," and "Just The Way I Am.") She also held up a mid-1970s coloring book of her.

* She talked about how she was "born with a happy heart" and tries to stay happy but being as tender-hearted as she is makes her very sensitive and easily hurt. But she added that her songwriting is her own therapy to get over that, that she has God, her God-given gift to write, and good family and friends to help her. "A broken heart won't kill you; it just makes you want to die," she said.

* She again discussed how she fasted for Hungry Again, taking only juice and fruits one week, water only the next week, and then juice and fruits again, all the while being alone in her Tennessee mountain home writing songs. She said this greatly cleansed her head, body, soul, and heart. She wrote enough songs for three albums during this time in the summer of 1997 and said she recorded all of them, choosing 12 for this particular CD. (She had previously said she'd like to release all of the songs with two subsequent albums.)

* Finally, she said she is a very spiritual person, that she believes very much in the energy of love and power and that God is love. She said she has studied many different religions and found in all of them the common factor that God is love. Also, she spoke of how one can find a piece of God in their own hearts, that the Kingdom of Heaven indeed dwells within, and that great faith is how she survives the hurts in her life. She explained how she has small chapels on each property she owns as well as prayer altars throughout her houses. She said she's not a fanatic, not crazy, but that prayer is something very personal and important in her life. (Before they showed her performance of "He's Alive," Loveless said it was one of the "most moving performances ever" at the CMA Awards.)