Songfacts®:

• "New York City ain't no kinda place for a country girl with a friendly face," Dolly Parton sings in "Tennessee Homesick Blues," which sums up her character's plight in the 1984 movie Rhinestone. Like Dolly, Jake Farris grew up the Great Smoky Mountains, where life was a lot simpler than in the Big Apple, where Jake tries to carve out a country music career by performing in a seedy nightclub called The Rhinestone. To get out of her contract, Jake bets her boss that she can transform anyone into a country sensation. Unfortunately that anyone turns out to be a New York cabbie played by Sylvester Stallone.
  
  Critics and audiences weren't kind to Sly's musical attempts and the movie was a flop. The soundtrack, however, spawned two hit singles and peaked at #22 on the Country Albums chart.
• This bittersweet reminiscence of country life was the soundtrack's lead single. It peaked at #1 on the Country chart.
• The soundtrack is mostly made up of compositions by Dolly based on stories in the movie. This tune especially hit her close to home: "It reminded me of when I first started writing songs about home," she noted in her 2020 book, Songteller. "'Tonight I'll sleep in Mama's feather bed' and lines like that kind of took me back."
• Before Rhinestone, Dolly starred in two hit films that earned her Golden Globe nominations for Best Actress in a Motion Picture Comedy or Musical: 9 to 5 and The Best Little Whorehouse In Texas. Despite the film's reputation, Dolly considers its soundtrack as one of her best albums.
• Some of the other tunes on the album are duets between her and Stallone. In her 2020 book, Songteller, Dolly weighed in on her co-star's musical ability: "Well, it's true that Sylvester Stallone cannot sing country music. But I'll tell you what he can sing: old '50s rock 'n' roll songs. That's what he sang on the set, and it sounded good. I had to write songs for him to sing, and a lot of people didn't like that, because he really didn't execute them very well. But I think that had to do with the fact that they were so out of his realm. It wasn't fair to him. I'll take responsibility for that."
• This earned Dolly a nomination for Best Female Country Vocal Performance at the 1985 Grammy Awards, but she lost to Emmylou Harris for "In My Dreams."