Dolly delivers travelogue of a show

For more than two hours (including an intermission) Dolly Parton sang and chattered and joked without rest at the Opera House in Boston last night. (Bill Brett for The Boston Globe)

There isn't a package in popular music quite as confused as the shrewd country bumpkin, liberated dumb blonde, and gifted theme-park operator named Dolly Parton. Those signature contradictions have fueled the country star's image and music for four decades, and at 62 - unreal-looking and pristine-sounding - Parton shows no signs of loosening her grip.

"I might look artificial, but where it counts I'm real," she sang last night at the Opera House. The song was "Backwoods Barbie," the autobiographical title track from her new album, and the lyric captured the essence of a show that managed the miraculous task of being cloyingly polished and sincerely heartfelt all at once.

For more than two hours (including an intermission) Parton sang and chattered and joked without rest. She delivered one-liners about her breasts and her hillbilly roots and the monthly mood swings we can expect if we put a woman in the White House, and songs that ran the gamut from classic country to glossy pop. A tight, dreary 11-piece band backed her, an ensemble so colorless one was hard-pressed to pick out a pedal steel or fiddle in the anonymous wash. This was the Dolly Parton show, and it felt vaguely like a travelogue, with vividly nostalgic narrative between songs and a set list that wasn't explicitly chronological, but frontloaded with early gems and frosted with a hit parade.

Parton's voice still flutters and skitters, pure as water. She strummed an autoharp (white and bejeweled like her dulcimer, piano, electric guitar, and dress) during "Coat of Many Colors," and lassoed the evergreen pain of a long-gone betrayal on "Jolene." "Backwoods Barbie" is Parton's first album of country music in 20 years, and she worked several of the strongest new tunes in where they belonged, during the show's rootsy first half.

But Parton saved the album's radio-ready first single, a platitude-filled anthem called "Better Get To Livin'," for the show's back end, where kitsch and crossover tunes ruled.

That's when the singer, now in skin-hugging shocking pink satin, answered questions about plastic surgery and her husband submitted by radio-station listeners.

She devoted an inexplicably lengthy stretch to a medley of her favorite hits from the '50s and '60s, and then launched into a crowd-pleasing run through her own chart-topping catalog: "Here You Come Again," "Islands in the Stream," "9 to 5," and "I Will Always Love You."

Love or hate Parton's shift from understated country tunesmith to mainstream pop star, she is the sum of her parts - the God-given and the shamelessly fabricated - and all were on proud display on stage. It was a strange, and sometimes sad, blend: equal parts inspired self-acceptance and desperate self-invention.

Joan Anderman can be reached at anderman@globe.com. For more on music visit boston.com/ae/music/blog.