We’ve got to close out a year like this one, and a holiday season like this one, with one of the most consequential musicians in all of pop culture: Dolly Parton.

This is the first time I’ve written about a single Christmas song, because for so many of the original popular ones, there’s not as much musical interest as there should be. Sure, Luther Vandross’s arrangements of Christmas classics are unassailable, but Christmas songs or albums are notorious for being dumping grounds for other tracks that couldn’t make it without a holiday association.

Enter Dolly. Patron Saint of, well, everything, and in my opinion, one of the most important Pop Culture Figures of the Horrid Year that was 2020. The things that are good in our culture owe so much to Dolly, whether we realize it or not. And more people (myself on that list) are starting to see & hear her for the titan she is, rather than just a country starlet.

Although I was raised on 70s & 80s (& a little bit of 90s) country music, I don’t consider myself an expert on Dolly. For that, you’d have to consult Dr. Annika Socolofsky, professor of composition at University of Colorado Boulder, who wrote her dissertation on Dolly.

Spoiler Alert: at nearly three minutes into the song, there’s a dramatic key change!

Intro: Dolly Parton is a better songwriter than Bob Dylan. She is a major philanthropist, a theme park magnate, an inductee to the Country Music Hall of Fame, a 10 time Grammy Award winner as well as a Lifetime Award Grammy winner, an EGOT nominee, and a cultural tour de force. She is possibly the most important & consequential songwriter of her age, and definitely the most-underrated. Unfortunately, “Hard Candy Christmas” was not a song that Dolly wrote, but was written by Carol Hall for the movie musical The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. It was Dolly’s single that immediately followed “I Will Always Love You,” which everyone knows that upon being covered by Whitney Houston, has become possibly the biggest selling popular music single of all time. Anyway.

Analysis: The chord progression of this song is deceptively simple, starting on an unusual I chord. When Parton sings “they’ll all lose track” (heard at :35 in the above recording), she lands on non-diatonic VI & VIsus chords, heading back into diatonic territory before she sings “bounce right back.” The chorus stays in relatively basic progression territory, with all diatonic chords (I-IV-V-I / iii-IV-iiV-I). This pattern repeats itself through the second verse and chorus repetition, and on the fourth chorus repetition, the key changes up an entire step.

At approximately 2:55 in the song (based on recording heard above), the key changes. That non-diatonic VI chord becomes a V chord in the next key, cementing the new key quickly. It’s a nifty modulation, which is made more interesting because the orchestration changes, and the increased presence of strings helps cement the new key. The drama is also enhanced because the key change takes about two seconds. Often, a key change takes a split second to make (refer to Cheap Trick’s “Surrender” for this, where instant modulations happens twice), but you can hear that pivot occur over the course of two full seconds, an eternity in a pop song, here.

Appropriateness for the Classroom: So long as you don’t mention the musical that the song is from, this song is relatively classroom appropriate. “Maybe I’ll just get drunk” may be a deal breaker for some teachers, but you can demonstrate the key change by simply playing the later choruses of the song, which contain no objectionable language.

What is always appropriate and one of the more heartwarming aspects of Dolly’s immense philanthropy is her Imagination Library, supporting early childhood literacy in the US, Canada, UK, Ireland, and Australia. You can learn more about the Imagination Library here.