Professional ratings
Aggregate scores
Source	Rating
Metacritic	67/100
Review scores
Source	Rating
Toronto Sun
The Scotsman
The Plain Dealer	C-
Newsday	B+
Now
Entertainment Weekly	A-
The Irish Times
The Guardian
Metro Weekly
Exclaim!	6/10

Pure & Simple is the 43rd solo studio album by American singer-songwriter Dolly Parton. It was released worldwide on August 19, 2016, by Dolly Records and RCA Nashville. It is Parton's seventh No. 1 country album, her first in twenty-five years.

The genesis for the project was a pair of intimate concerts Parton performed at Nashville's Ryman Auditorium in August 2015, featuring Parton and a quartet of backing players, entitled "Dolly Parton: Pure and Simple". The concerts were repeated the following weekend with four performances at Dollywood. The shows were well received and from that emerged the idea to produce a similarly stripped down album and tour.

At a press conference held in Toronto, Canada on June 13, 2014 Parton covered a wide range of topics to promote the Canadian leg of her Pure & Simple Tour. Among the tidbits were that the album would be distributed worldwide by Sony Music for Dolly Records, its release date had been moved from August 26 to August 19, that the title track would be a single and that "Outside Your Door" might be the second single. The album was ultimately distributed through RCA Nashville, effectively reuniting Parton (who'd been with RCA from 1967 - 1986) with her longtime record label.

Four songs from the album have been previously recorded by Parton in one form or another:

The Pure & Simple Tour was announced March 6, 2016 on Parton's official website. A press conference was held the following day providing additional details concerning the tour. The trek is coined as Parton's biggest tour in 25 years. 64 dates are planned in the United States and Canada, visiting the most requested markets missed on previous tours. Alongside the tour; the singer's latest album, Pure & Simple is set to be released. Parton explained a tour was not planned due to her busy schedule. In August 2015, the singer performed two sold out shows at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville as well as four shows the following weekend at Dollywood. The scaled down shows sparked Parton's interest in returning to the stage.

To promote the album and tour, as well as Dollywood, Parton appeared on Hallmark Channel's Home & Family everyday during the week of May 30 - June 3, 2016. Throughout the week Parton performed 7 songs, 3 new songs off the album ("Pure and Simple," "Mama," and "Say Forever You'll Be Mine"), 1 song from the movie Dolly Parton's Coat of Many Colors ("Angel Hill" with Alyvia Alyn Lind) and 3 classics ("Coat of Many Colors," "Applejack" and "My Tennessee Mountain Home").

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