Mary Chapin Carpenter: Party Doll And Other Favorites : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Purists love to act like Merle Haggard was the last cool thing to happen to country music, but we lived through a golden age as recently as the early Nineties. Back then, Mary Chapin Carpenter was Nashville's proudest oddity and most unexpected icon -- a New Jerseyite with folkie roots, feminist leanings and a big, guilty boogie streak. Her ballads turned you to mush; her good-time rockers weren't dumb. Women who would have sworn that country music was dreck flocked to her in droves. Party Doll and Other Favorites, a cool retrospective of live cuts, soundtrack nuggets, Number One country hits and a couple of new tunes, tells her story well. There's a new version of her Cajun romp "Down at the Twist and Shout" and an acoustic "I Take My Chances." "Quittin' Time," recorded at Nashville's former Opry home, the Ryman Auditorium, is an introspective relationship elegy. Today, if the Dixie Chicks or Shania Twain did a song with that title, you know it would be about peeling off nylons and kicking back with a margarita. But that's now, and the good old early Nineties were then. (RS 816-817)

KAREN SCHOEMER