Margo Price had a busy weekend at what Minnesotans call the Great Minnesota Get-Together, and Dolly Parton was in most of it. Price played the Luther Auto Bandshell on both Saturday and Sunday at the Minnesota State Fair in St Paul, and sang "9 To 5" three separate times across the two days.
She had already put her position on the record. "Dolly Parton was a living saint and a national treasure," Price wrote after Parton's death at 80. She went further than the usual tribute, arguing that Parton's songwriting and philanthropy did not just reshape country music but changed the world, and that although she was famously non-political she never needed a podium: she showed where she stood through the causes she backed and the lyrics she wrote.
Price named two songs specifically, "9 To 5" and "Just Because I'm a Woman", calling them anthems for the working class, for women, for the gay community and for anyone who needed to hear they were not alone. That is a reading of Parton's catalogue that has become more common since her death and was not always the standard one.
The first performance came during Saturday's bandshell set. Parton wrote "9 To 5" for the 1980 film she starred in alongside Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin, and the song earned an Academy Award nomination.
The second was less planned. Price turned up unannounced on Sunday at the fair's Country-Oke session, hosted by Thomas Sticha at the MPR State Fair Station, and sang it karaoke-style. The third was a video she posted from backstage with her band, in a stripped-down arrangement where she kept time by clicking her fingernails, the way Parton did on the original recording to imitate a typewriter.
Between all that, Price crossed the fairgrounds before her Sunday bandshell set to join Tanya Tucker on the Grandstand Stage for "Delta Dawn", Tucker's signature song. Sierra Ferrell headlined that stage afterwards and opened her encore with Parton's "Here I Am", so the fair produced three separate Parton moments in one afternoon.
Ferrell went on from Minnesota to join Dave Matthews Band at the new Mystic Lake Amphitheater the following night, after Matthews said he had begged her to stay in the state. The wider country response to Parton's death has run through arenas, festivals and, in this case, a karaoke booth at a state fair.
The facts
- Margo Price sang 9 To 5 three times over the Minnesota State Fair weekend
- One of them was an unannounced turn at the fair's Country-Oke session
- In a backstage video she kept time with her fingernails as Parton did on the record
- She joined Tanya Tucker on the Grandstand Stage for Delta Dawn
- Sierra Ferrell covered Parton's Here I Am at the start of her own encore
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