If the last of our outdoor summer concerts had to be Dolly Parton, well I’ll tell you what, that’s a dang ol good time I reckon.

Dolly Parton brought her Pure & Simple tour to a packed, chuffed Toronto crowd for what can only be described as a Friday night hootenanny. WordPress has just informed me that ‘hootenanny’ is in fact spelled with two n’s. True to the album’s title, it was just sparkly AF Dolly up there with a minimalistically lit 3-piece band. Her setlist was what you’d hope for in a Dolly Parton show: the smash hits. “Coat of Many Colours”, “9 to 5”, “The Grass is Blue” and a barnburning rendition of “Jolene”. She also played an equally sparkly saxophone – for “Yakety Sax” of course.

She told stories of her childhood in the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee and took the piss out of the US election cycle, positing that perhaps she should run “but I think they got enough boobs in that race”. Self-loathing/absorbed shoegazing rock stars take note: this is how you do rock stardom.