She Come by It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs
(Scribner, $22)
“This book is a kind of a reclamation project,” said Lorraine Berry in the Los Angeles Times. Not that its subject, Dolly Parton, requires special pleading: The country icon inspires adulation among people of widely divided classes, races, and political affiliations, and many fans before Sarah Smarsh have paid her tribute. But Smarsh, who wrote about her own Kansas farming family in the best-selling memoir Heartland, makes an additional claim for Parton’s appeal: that she embodies a type of working-class feminism that doesn’t use the term but walks the walk. “This signature Parton trifecta—eyebrow-raising tight clothes, generosity of heart, and a take-nocrap attitude,” she writes, “is an overlooked, unnamed sort of feminism I recognize in the hard-luck women who raised me.”
“Making reluctant feminists out of famous women tends to be a task more arduous than fruitful,” said Lauren Michele Jackson in The New Yorker. But Smarsh mostly pulls it off. Parton, who grew up in a large, poor Tennessee family, writes songs about the resilient women she knew then. Success came early: a Grand Ole Opry performance at 13, a record deal at 19, a TV gig at 20. But that show’s host was controlling, and Smarsh “finds a feminist origin story” in Parton’s 1973 decision to finally cut ties. Parton has since performed a balancing act, speaking to women’s concerns while politely declining a feminist label. Smash imagines a type of urbane woman who scoffs at Parton’s hypercoiffed femininity. But there’s no need. “Resentment has never been part of the Parton ensemble.”
Parton has become more outspoken lately, said Emily Choate in the Chattanooga, Tenn., Times Free Press. In August, she thrilled some fans and angered others by expressing solidarity with Black Lives Matter. Parton has never lacked convictions, having displayed through her charitable work an “unshakable commitment” to her Smoky Mountains homeland. Smarsh, wisely, lets Dolly be more than a symbol or avatar. “Like us, she’s a fallible human being, learning on the fly.”