Hello Again, Dolly

There were only a couple of signs during Dolly Parton’s performance Wednesday at the House of Blues to indicate she was on her first concert tour in a decade.

One was the exaggerated way she established eye contact with fans in each quarter of the overstuffed room, a gesture more suited to an arena than to a club. The other was the video screen opposite the stage scrolling the lyrics of each song.

If Parton wasn’t 100% secure with the words halfway into this 13-city tour, she was in total command of the fans, who greeted her with an unusually effusive roar.

Although that crowd was ready to genuflect at the altar of Parton’s celebrity, she quickly put the focus on her music, specifically on the roots-oriented mountain sounds she has returned to in recent years, to modest commercial success and considerable critical acclaim.

Despite the outrageous public persona Parton has maintained for nearly four decades, she silenced the boisterous Dolly-heads to a hush as she launched a series of songs from her new “Halos & Horns” album and its two bluegrass-centered, Grammy-winning predecessors, last year’s “Little Sparrow” and 1999’s “The Grass Is Blue.”

When one fan shouted, “We love you!” Parton smiled and in her familiar Tennessee drawl shot back, “I love you too--now be quiet!” Then she sang “Mountain Angel,” a haunting fable of a charmed young woman who suffers a tragic fate after giving her love to an undeserving man.

It had the aura of a folk tale, as do many of the songs Parton has written since being dropped by her last major label in the early ‘90s, just as country radio put her in the Over the Hill Gang.

Now Parton, 56, seems as pleasantly surprised at being back on tour as her fans are to hear her live again. “I never stopped writing songs during all that time when I wasn’t getting played on the radio and when nobody was interested in me at a label,” said Parton, curled up on an oversized chair upstairs at the club a few hours before show time. “And I didn’t pursue it that hard. I thought, ‘Good Lord, I’ve been so lucky, I’ve had a great career, there’s no point in trying to shove myself down people’s throats if they don’t want it.’ ”

She was wearing a relatively subdued dark denim jacket and pants, nowhere near as flashy as the filmy, sparkling pink dress she would change into for the concert. Her short blond locks are less imposing now than in her Truly Big Hair heyday, when she reigned from the late 1960s through much of the ‘80s as one of the queens of country music.

Having spent most of the ‘80s making one pop-oriented record after another, she underwent a musical rebirth in 1994 with “Heartsongs,” recorded live at her Dollywood theme park, in which she mixed some of her early country hits with songs of the Carter Family and other country, bluegrass and mountain music pioneers. It continued with “Hungry Again,” a 1996 album whose title song began, “The thrill, the desire, the excitement is gone,” neatly summing up Parton’s feeling about her own career direction.

“I wrote it as a love song just to have a commercial song, but actually when I came up with the title,” she said Wednesday, “that’s exactly what I was thinking: writing and singing like I was hungry again.”

A tall order for a woman who will never worry again where her next meal is coming from, thanks to a long string of country hits that she parlayed in the late ‘70s into pop crossover success (“Here You Come Again,” “Islands in the Stream”), movie (“9 to 5”) and TV stardom as well as Dollywood, in Pigeon Forge, one of Tennessee’s top tourist attractions, about 35 miles from Knoxville.

All that diversification shunted Parton’s songwriting aside, which gnawed at her because she takes songwriting more seriously than any other aspect of her career.

Over dinner one night in 1998 with friend and producer Steve Buckingham, a senior vice president at Santa Monica-based Welk Music Group, Parton got the idea to try a full-on bluegrass album.

Welk had recently bought the bluegrass-oriented Sugar Hill Records label, and Buckingham told Parton that Sugar Hill had run a survey of interested parties asking who they’d most like to hear do a bluegrass record who’d never done one. Parton topped the list.

The story tantalized Parton. “I had two months that I knew were pretty flexible.... I said, ‘If you think we can do it in six or eight weeks, I know what songs I’d do.’ So I just gathered ‘em up, I wrote a few, and we had it ready. That was ‘The Grass Is Blue.’ ”

“Grass” and “Little Sparrow” have sold between 175,000 and 200,000 copies apiece and won her two Grammy Awards. “Halos & Horns” is off to a respectable start by roots music standards, logging more than 50,000 copies in its first month, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

“I think I’m the happiest I’ve ever been, artistically,” she said. “I don’t have to deal with managers--I manage myself--I make all my own decisions and have my own label.... I own my own masters, so I write ‘em, I publish ‘em, I own ‘em, and I’m producing ‘em.

“I’m home-owned, home-operated,” she said with a saleswoman-on-fire toss of her head. “I’ll be selling out of the trunk of my car if I need to.”