She Come by It Natural; Dolly Parton, Songteller review – no Dumb Blonde
In 1977, Dolly Parton was interviewed by Barbara Walters in a TV special. The singer was 31 and, having not long extricated herself from a professional partnership with the country singer Porter Wagoner, had conquered the pop charts with the album Here You Come Again. Walters asked if puberty came early for Parton and, gesturing to her breasts, inquired: “Is it all you?” She then invited Parton to stand up so viewers could inspect her figure, and asked why she bothered with the makeup, the wigs and the clothes. “You don’t have to look like this,” Walters said, wagging a finger at her.
Walters isn’t the only one to have treated Parton like a prize cow. Oprah Winfrey once ushered her on to her feet and invited everyone to take a closer look, as did the talk show host Phil Donahue, who added: “I know guys that wouldn’t let you out of the house.” Johnny Carson looked at her chest on national TV and said: “I would give about a year’s pay to peek under there.”
Parton has put up with all this with unassailable grace and humour, often combating the insults by beating people to the punchline. “It costs a lot of money to look this cheap,” she has said, repeatedly. Lately, though, we have seen a reappraisal of Parton mercifully unconnected to her appearance. In 2014, she played the legends slot at Glastonbury, prompting a wave of joy and affection from across the generations, and drawing one of the biggest crowds in the festival’s history. Two years later, Parton played a concert in Queens, New York, as part of her Pure and Simple tour. In a year characterised by division and intolerance, reviewers and fans observed a multiracial audience in which drag queens and LGBT + Dolly devotees stood side by side with churchgoing families and Stetson-wearing country fans.
In 2019, the hit podcast Dolly Parton’s America depicted the singer as a social unifier, a musical trailblazer and a business genius. Among the contributors was the author and academic Sarah Smarsh, whose thoughtful, sharply observed book now joins the latter-day chorus of approval and provides a counterpoint to the image of Parton as a surgically enhanced object of fun. She Come by It Natural looks at the singer through the lens of class and gender, and reveals how the typecasting of Parton as a “dumb blonde” was seriously wide of the mark.
The book also comes with an autobiographical seam. Telling of Parton’s famously impoverished childhood in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, and her subsequent move to Nashville to make her fortune, Smarsh weaves in tales of her own trailer-park background in Kansas and her desire for a better life. She includes stories of her mother, who was a single parent, and her grandmother, Betty, who was born the same year as Parton, and who married and divorced six times. The author digs deep into Parton’s lyrical preoccupations that portray the darker side of working-class female experience – “Daddy Come and Get Me” is about a woman who has been institutionalised by her husband so he can continue his philandering undisturbed; in “Down from Dover” a pregnant girl is kicked out of her parents’ house and gives birth to a stillborn daughter alone. Parton’s early songs are, Smarsh says, “southern gothic defences of poor women”.
Much has been made in recent years about whether Parton can feasibly be called a feminist. Parton herself rejects the term, but her actions and her life story show a woman who has done battle with controlling men and won, and who has subverted stereotypes around women and the female body. Smarsh unpicks all this with an elegant blend of exasperation and common sense. Noting the “class chasm” that runs through any political movement, she observes how Parton’s career took off just as feminism’s second wave was gathering force. Parton thus provided “a revealing contrast between feminism as a political concept and feminism embodied in the world. Like most women in poverty, Parton knew little of the former but excelled at the latter.”
She furthermore shows how
Parton’s refusal to nail her political colours to the mast is a reflection of her business sense and unfailing diplomacy. Her actions speak loudly, however. A renowned philanthropist, Parton famously bankrolls the Imagination Library, a charity that gives free books to children; she also provided $1,000 a month to those affected by the Tennessee wildfires in 2016. While the US president was busily underplaying the risks of Covid-19, it turned out Parton had donated $1m to the development of the Moderna vaccine, which so far is testing as 95% successful. Not for nothing does Smarsh describe her as “not just an entertainer but a spiritual godmother”. Right now, you can see Parton in the Netflix film, Christmas on the Square, in which she literally plays a guardian angel.
Dolly Parton, Songteller: My Life in Lyrics stops short of presenting the singer as a living, breathing angel, but it nonetheless bursts with down-home warmth and goodness. Parton provides snapshots of her life via lyric sheets (175 songs are detailed here though she has written close to 3,000), family photographs, pictured artefacts and song notes. There are anecdotes about her biggest hits – “Jolene” was inspired by a bank clerk who made eyes at her husband, Carl; “Coat of Many Colours” was based on the coat she wore to school, which was fashioned out of old rags – all delivered with the charming, folksy romanticism for which she is famous.
It’s all very on-brand but the book is also testament to the fact that Parton has never forgotten her roots or her community – the downtrodden and disenfranchised remain the inspiration for her song-writing, while her Dollywood theme park keeps much of eastern Tennessee employed. Near the end, there is a song about coronavirus that poignantly tells us “Darkness fades when faced with light / And everything’s gonna be alright.” Next to it, a perfectly coiffed Parton poses in a mask decorated with lots of tiny guitars.
• She Come by It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs by Sarah Smarsh is published byOne (£9.99); Dolly Parton, Songteller: My Life in Lyrics by Dolly Parton and Robert K Oermann is published by Hodder & Stoughton (£35).To order copies go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
She provides a revealing contrast between feminism as a political concept and feminism embodied in the world