Let’s start with the music for a change. Dolly Parton sang beautifully and accompanied herself with an able touch on guitar, piano, violin, banjo, harmonica, dulcimer, tin whistle and tambourine. She led the way through elaborate, a cappella harmony arrangements of Do I Ever Cross Your Mind and the sorrowful Little Sparrow. She stormed through a medley of gospel tunes, dabbled with Jerry Lee Lewis’s rock’n’roll standard Great Balls of Fire, squeaked and squealed her way through the first single she released — Puppy Love — and encored with her latest, Jesus and Gravity, from her new album, Backwoods Barbie.

And at regular points during her two-hour performance in Glasgow, she pulled out a succession of hits from one of the great songbooks of the country-pop era: Jolene, Islands in the Stream, 9 to 5, Coat of Many Colours and a show-stopping I Will Always Love You.

With all this going for her, it might seem surprising that Parton’s achievements as a musician should still be eclipsed by her larger-than-life persona. Surprising, that is, until you find yourself in the presence of a 62-year-old woman who looks like a hentai cartoon.

Encased in a tightly fitted, white, rhinestone-spangled dress, her figure was notable as much for the minuscule waist and legs as for the astonishing embonpoint of her upper body. And, given the implausible length of her red, talon-like fingernails, the wonder of it all was how she managed to play any of the multiple instruments on which she displayed such seemingly effortless mastery.

Not content with her responsibilities as singer, songwriter and leader of her 11-piece band, Parton also assumed the mantle of storyteller, anchoring songs such as I’m Little but I’m Loud and Thank God I’m a Country Girl in a loosely scripted voyage around her life and indomitable personality. Some of the stories sounded a little forced, and she needs to rest that line about telling people that “it costs a lot to look this cheap”.

But the invitation to step into Dollyworld was hard to resist.

She spoke movingly about her hard-scrabble life growing up in the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee as one of 12 children, all born to her parents before they reached their late thirties. And she has not worked the stages of the world since before she was a teenager without learning a thing or two about comic timing.

But, in the end, it all came back to the songs. Here she insisted was where the essence of her personality could always be found. “I might look artificial/ But where it counts I’m real,” she sang in the title track of Backwoods Barbie. And in a funny way, she is.

Tour continues : Cardiff International Arena, Friday, July 4; O2 Arena, London SE10, Saturday and Sunday, July 5 and 6.

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