How Dolly Parton became an icon of the feminist working class
Sarah Smarsh grew up in Kansas, and in her 2018 memoir, “Heartland,” she gave voice to the working-class and poor community in which she had come of age. It was a sharp rebuke to a cadre of journalists and pundits who had pushed a popular media narrative during the 2016 presidential election: that “working-class” voters had turned to Trump out of “economic anxiety.” The story soon resembled a perpetual motion machine as college-educated reporters undertook expeditions into heartland diners in search of those who fit the preconceived narrative — a practice that continues to this day.
In “Heartland,” she detailed the daily struggle of those working service or farm jobs to not only put food on the table but also access basic medical care. She herself had worked many of those jobs, so knew what she wrote about firsthand.
The author’s follow-up is both surprising and completely of a piece. “She Come by It Natural” is a paean to cultural icon Dolly Parton, who emerged from her povertystricken upbringing in Pigeon Forge, Tenn., to become a country superstar and philanthropist. Smarsh argues that the mischaracterizations of poor people that plagued campaign coverage had also slighted the country singer, with the added insult of typecasting her as “a dumb blonde.”
She is not the first fan to reassess Parton’s reputation. In recent years, the LGTBQ community has embraced her as an ally, and not only for her public statements of support.
This book is a kind of reclamation project, beginning with a typecast persona. In Parton’s trademark presentation as a tiny woman with enormous breasts and a pile of blond hair, Smarsh sees a type of feminism formed outside the halls of academia: “This signature Parton trifecta — eyebrow-raising tight clothes, generosity of heart, and a takeno-crap attitude — is an overlooked, unnamed sort of feminism I recognize in the hardluck women who raised me.”
Next on Smarsh’s reclamation list is country music itself, typecast as solely the province of dogs, booze and trucks. On the contrary, Smarsh says, it empowered her. She declares it a great blessing to have been raised “against a backdrop of declarative statements sung by women in denim and big hair.” The female songwriters in country performed the “transmutation of pain into power.” Smarsh ties the media’s diminishment of that power to the same impulse that drove its 2016 narrative; they focus on the “precious sadness” and poverty of rural life, missing the joy.
“She Come by It Natural” is a praise song for the cultural icon, but what emerges from an examination of Parton’s life and work is just how much relevance her lyrics have had — for
Smarsh and for other women — and why so much of the writing in the book is deeply personal. “Dolly’s music and life contained what I wanted to say about class, gender, and my female forebears: That country music by women was the formative feminist text of my life.” The fruit of that devotion is a tribute to the woman who continues to demonstrate that feminism comes in coats of many colors.