pop musician navigating intersections of entertainment and identity with a political acuity akin to her exact contemporary, Bill Clinton. And as a representative figure in the story of how country music the genre and country music the format, two very different beasts, have rubbed each other the wrong way, if to sometimes profitable ends. The 1970s and 1980s, the decades of Parton’s greatest fluctuation, were the period in which, through formatting, country established itself as a blockbuster-level pop music category. In 1979, country aspired to Dolly Parton. In 1989, country was becoming
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