Songfacts®:

• This upbeat breakup song about splitting up and getting gone is the title track of Dolly Parton's 42nd album. She told Billboard magazine that the name of the record had been floating around inside her head for a while. "When I first started doing my bluegrass stuff, I always thought that would make a great title for a bluegrass band," she said. "I didn't do anything with that, but I loved the title. So, I thought 'I need to write a song about 'Blue Smoke' of some kind, and wondered what that would be. I thought maybe a train, so I wrote it a long time ago. Then, when I put together a tour and an album, that song kept coming back to me."
  
  "Of course, it also represented the blue smoke that rises off the Smoky Mountains," Dolly continued. "It was just one of those things where it kept coming around and coming around, plus the other part of it was there were so much bluegrass influences. It just seemed to fit all those things."
• Blue Smoke debuted at #6 on the Billboard 200 album chart. Surprisingly it was Dolly's first solo long player to reach the Top 10 of the all format tally. She'd previously also reached #6 in 1987 with Trio, her collaboration record with Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris.