Dolly Parton once said, “My weaknesses have always been food and men – in that order.” The Tennessee mountain mama’s clearly Those Darlins’ spiritual guide. The ladies – who go by Nikki, Jessi, and Kelley Darlin – came together from Virginia, Kentucky, and South Carolina, finding common ground as volunteers at the Murfreesboro, Tenn.-based Southern Girls Rock & Roll Camp, which Kelley founded in 2003.
“We’d all been exposed to country growing up, but we all rebelled against it, ya know,” Jessi explains. “We loved rock & roll. When we met, though, we’d all recently become obsessed with old country, and we started playing covers. Then we started playing more shows, and then it was, ‘I guess we should put out an album?'”
That mix of traditional country and rock & roll flows like a whiskey river from last year’s self-titled debut, self-released on their Oh Wow Dang label. The trio rearranges the family dynamic on songs like “Snaggle Tooth Mama,” which touches on their upbringings: “Well I get my clothes from the local dump, they call it the Flatwood Mall. Folks ’round here don’t know the difference between a dump and a hole in the wall.”
The feminine flip side to country’s traditional gaze results in a half-dozen other gems: “Wild One” advises, “I’m tired of you telling me, ‘Honey please slow down.’ I’ll do just what I want, so don’t order me around,” and “The Whole Damn Thing” is a glassy-eyed recounting of late-night snacking gone awry. Ballad “DUI or Die” takes the masculine rebel without a cause story and turns it into a modern woman’s tale of lust and inebriation: “Remember if you want to drink and drive, better find a boy to take you home for the night.”
So what about Dolly’s weaknesses?
“Hehhhyyyep,” Jessi laughs, stretching the word out a country mile. “That’s about right.”
This article appears in March 19 • 2010.